What the hell is their fascination with raw milk?

Where I live in the USA, it's become a trendy thing amongst rural conservatives. If someone is talking about how they switched to raw milk, it's almost a guarantee they are MAGA supporters. Which is wild, because when I was growing up, it was almost the complete opposite. Raw milk was a "hippy" thing for fringe, counter-culture liberals.

My clearly biased opinion is that in this part of the US, drinking raw milk is at least partially a way to virtue signal and participate in the counter-culture. And when you think about it, drinking raw milk kind of actually makes sense in this context. It appeals to a lot of conservatives' cultural beliefs -- anti-science / mistrust of science, "rules for thee but not for me", and appeal to convention. Scientists are wrong. Nobody can tell me what I'm allowed to do. People drank raw milk for thousands of years and survived just fine.

Speculative opinion aside: The people I've met over the years who seek out raw milk have mentioned a number of different reasons.

Some say it tastes better than pasteurized milk. Some claim that raw milk is more nutritious than pasteurized because the heating process destroys or binds proteins, vitamins, immunity boosting components, etc in milk. Some do it because it's quicker or cheaper than a trip to the store (because they know the farmer, farmer lives close or delivers because farm is a friend/family member), and they're supporting local producers instead of giant conglomerates. Also, pretty uniformly, they'll claim that with modern practices, there's very little risk of getting sick if you're careful, and not riskier than buying pasteurized stuff from the store.

And let me explicitly state this because some people on Lemmy seem to have reading comprehension issues: These are not my opinions and I'm not saying they are accurate, I do not drink raw milk, and I don't condone it, particularly if you're feeding it to unsuspecting people and children.

Anecdotally, it seems like a good solid chunk of these folks eventually get sick enough or frequently enough from drinking raw milk that it's very common to find out 4 or 5 years down the line that they no longer drink raw milk. And that's just the ones who admit it, because I would not be surprised if it's even more common than I think -- a lot of people are too stubborn to switch back or too prideful to admit they were wrong.

There are heat sensitive compounds in milk that break down during pasteurization. They’re important if you’re a baby cow. I don’t think it’s worth risking your life for though.