Mmm, raw milk
There's no better signal of a culture's relationship with nature than how its people eat
Before I delve into today’s issue, I want to note that the big run of Southern book events begins tonight, with my hometown reading at Octavia Books in New Orleans, in conversation with the great Nathaniel Rich.
Saturday I’ll be up in Denham Springs, La., with river maven Clint Willson—and then I embark on the Greater Delta tour, with stops in Jackson (twice!), Memphis, Helena, Clarksdale, Oxford, and Cleveland. Find the specific dates and locations here.
The best part of the tour will be the Great River paddle expedition with the Quapaw Canoe Company—right through the wildest heart of the Mississippi Delta. Tickets still available!
Other book updates: an excerpt of the book will appear in the next issue of Smithsonian, and is online now; there are nice new reviews from Grist and The Advocate; and a delightful chat ran on WWNO’s “The Reading Life” and is streamable now.
Now on to… raw milk?
My home state of Louisiana is one of the few places in the country where the sale of “raw” milk—which has not yet been pasteurized to kill bacteria—is fully illegal. Not much longer, though, as Axios recently reported. As soon as our illustrious new governor signs a pending bill, the milk shall be freed.
Raw milk is having a moment. And it’s a really, really bad moment for that moment.
In late 2022, I wrote a feature for The New Republic about a strain of bird flu that was ransacking the country’s poultry farms—and its wild animals, too. Infections hit foxes and seals and at least one dolphin in Florida. It was clear that the disease would not be going away soon, that it would keep on festering, evolving, potentially finding a way to spread from human to human. And bird flu has historically been far more deadly than Covid.
So the news this spring that bird flu was now spreading on cattle farms was, well, not good,1 especially since it appears that milk can be a vector. As Nature recently reported, unpasteurized milk from infected cows can contain “astronomical numbers of viral particles”; when cats on one Texas farm were fed raw milk from an infected farm, more than half died.
One of the lessons I learned back in 2022 was that pandemics are about, among other things, the scale and speed of human society. “Pandemics happen because we don’t share information quickly, because we don’t have vaccines ready to go, because the world is becoming more connected,” the biologist Colin Carlson told me. Given this, the response to bird flu has not been promising As Dhruv Khullar recently noted in the New Yorker, there’s been no widespread screening of farm animals, limited data released about the genetic flu sequences that have been released, and no antibody studies in farm workers to track infections.
And now, for no good reason, we’re opening the spigots on raw milk.
I’ve been loosely tracking the raw milk propaganda machine for several years. What first caught my attention was the case of an Amish farmer who’s been engaged in a long feud with the federal government over his sales of raw milk. After federal officials raided his farm, he became an icon in conservative circles. Lately, TikTok influencers have taken up the cause of raw milk more broadly, touting the (supposed) benefits of unpasteurized milk. The long and the short of those benefits is that they’re not supported by science.
Still, back when I was reading Wendell Berry, he convinced me to admire Amish farmers and their commitment to tradition—to principles that “define a world to be lived by human beings, not a world to be exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts,” as Berry puts it. The historian Bill Cronon has talked about how, if you want to study what a culture thinks about nature, one of the first places to look is at how its people eat. And our American food system, if not our food, is oil-soaked—dependent on fossil fuels, subject to endless processing, producing vast amounts of waste. Like Berry, Cronon blames in part the fact that so few of us farm: “Because we specialize, we remove ourselves from the results of what we do.”
I get the appeal of raw milk; it feels good to be “closer” to nature. But raw milk is the wrong kind of closeness. Simply cutting out some step in the production chain does not somehow make you, the milk drinker, into a virtuous Amish farmer. The real work is harder.
The Coronavirus revealed that “nature” is a complex thing: I love it, mostly, but I don’t love those microbes. The way we’ve changed the world has unleashed a new kind of wilderness, an epidemiological hyperobject; the planes that crisscross our world can spread an infection at alarming speed. We live in a world—and an era—of microbes; there’s an interesting argument to make that we’re in not the Anthropocene but the Microbiocene. Some of these bits of life can hurt us, of course, but others are essential parts of who we are: We could not eat our food without their help. We don’t really exist as individual entities, then, but assemblages—part human, part virus, part bacteria. All ecology. There’s no way to get closer to nature when we’re already entwined. The goal needs to be how to live amid nature so that everyone, nature included, can thrive.
📍 The soul-tracker
As someone that’s been flinging himself along a book tour for the past week, I was struck by this hypothetical smart phone app, described in an essay in Noēma.
You plot your origin and destination on a map before getting on a plane, and when you land, a tiny dot will be inching toward your new location: your displaced soul, patiently plodding after your body. If you stay where you are, it will eventually catch you up, but if you jet off somewhere else, it will have to keep chasing; presumably, if you kept on moving, it might never catch you. The idea was meant to be entertaining, but I found it haunting. In the age of mass transit, our restless world must be thick with ceaselessly roving souls, wandering imagined maps with no hope of reunification.
🌳 The future forests of the South
A few months back, I predicted a potential boom in reforestation credits in the South, especially along the Mississippi River. A recent study in Environmental Research Letters that identified abandoned cropland suggests that Louisiana in particular has plenty of land ready to reforest.
Also relevant to the discussion: amid criticisms of the carbon offset concept, the Biden Administration released guidelines a few weeks back meant to strengthen and improve the markets.
🌊 Will the river ever be unleashed?
There has been a small step forward in the never-ending fight over the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the project meant to restore Louisiana’s marshes by poking a hole in the Mississippi River levee. The plans were greenlit early last year, and work began, only to be halted by a lawsuit. Now, thanks to negotiation, “pre-construction”—“site preparation and construction on various temporary structures”—has resumed, as the Times-Picyune reports.
+ A massive die-off of cane in the delta has for years been blamed on an invasive bug. New research, though, suggests climate change and saltwater intrusion are to blame. (Verite)
Other links of note
Over at Vox, Benji Jones delves into the world of Appalachian salamanders—which are incredibly diverse, but increasingly under threat.
At Noēma, Irina Zhorov examines the profusion of artificial reefs off the coast of Alabama—and the complex science of how we assess their worth.
At a recent North Mississippi Allstars show, I was reminded how much I like the fife—so I was pleased to stumble upon this Country Roads story about the Indigenous roots of the instrument, which was once made with rivercane.
Though I have my questions about the new era of Field and Stream, as I’ve shared before, I did enjoy this essay by new owner Eric Church about a transformative encounter with ticks.
Even worse, though, would be an outbreak on a pig farm, since pigs are known as “mixing vessels”; their cells have receptors that can be infected by both avian and human flus, allowing rapid evolution that mixes elements of both strains.
See you in Helena on the 28th!
I laughed a little when I saw your photo of choice for the raw milk because I used to read Susy's blog for years, and she and her husband had a podcast for a while. While they had many great things to learn from, they were very into Weston Price, raw milk, and things that were/are rather fringe and dubious.
I hadn't heard about the cat deaths via raw milk situation, thanks for bringing that up.
Best of luck on the book tour!