RE: Robert F. Kennedy recommends raw milk. NYT 03/31/2026

Written by Suzanne Lupien

The endangerments promulgated by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are many. The latest, reported on the front page of The New York Times Tuesday, March 31, advising Americans to consume raw milk, strikes me as especially egregious and dangerous and prompts this response.

I am a farmer, and I know something about cows and milk which I feel obligated to share.

As with most directives emanating from the strange mind of Mr. Kennedy at this time, and from the government agencies charged with guiding the American people on matters of health for decades, no substantive information is provided to help establish what constitutes good and correct farming practice nor what distinguishes good from bad. This irresponsible habit of our government definitively removes any shred of legitimacy of their powers, from which this directive comes to us. 

To encourage Americans to drink raw milk now, in these darkest of ages of horrific, unnatural, and inhumane treatment of cows, is a most reckless endorsement which needs to be immediately discredited. I would add that the reporter made no mention whatsoever of animal health and welfare on the farms of today and the impact on the milk quality, which reflects just how far we have distanced ourselves from decency and care for the animals who sustain us. 

This distancing contributes to our inability to see what we have before our eyes. In point of fact, the living conditions for the cows on the average American factory farm are unconscionably wretched, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the honorable farming practice of grazing cows on healthy forages, moving freely out under the sun. Instead, cows are packed like sardines by the thousands, standing painfully and largely immobile on concrete in huge modern facilities. All we see is the “advanced” robotic technology, the nifty packing. The notion of “success” of the enterprise rests squarely on the bottom line.

The impressive sleight of hand of the modern dairy industry is its cleverness in concealing the brutality of mechanized milk-making that is capable of producing huge quantities of milk and pushing the cows to extremely short lives while presenting it to the public as a wholesome and healthy product.

The same marketing strategy we use for dairy, of course, we use for the neatly packaged chicken, pork, and fish, and virtually everything else generated by contemporary agriculture. The modern confinement farms are not farms at all; they are factories. You can expect similar treatment for everything from bread to broccoli. It’s just that cows have a heart. They are feeling beings, and they are at our mercy.

For ages now, American agriculture policy has promoted large-scale operations generating standardized food to the supermarkets — food which looks good, is uniform and consistent, but is not fit to eat. Supermarkets are where most people obtain their food, with no viable available alternative. Furthermore, large-scale farming practices are out of control, responsible for an enormous amount of pollution, sickening the soils, laying waste to large tracts of land through erosion and the use of pesticides and herbicides and chemical fertilizers. It was not always thus. This fundamental violation of our birthright of health and happiness is justified with the contention that we must accept these wildly out of scale, out of whack means in order to feed the growing population. But these practices run counter to all known definitions of goodness; they have nothing to recommend them, and they are immoral.

We cannot achieve or maintain health; we cannot thrive on this food. And we could not but seriously endanger ourselves by consuming raw milk produced in these highly unsanitary and unhealthy conditions, no matter what crafty means we have devised to mask their intrinsic deficiencies.

Modern cows are suffering terribly every minute of their abbreviated lives. Most cows test positive for Bovine Leucosis and depend on antibiotics to survive the conditions to which they are subjected.

Robert Kennedy doesn’t know what he is saying. To encourage people to drink raw milk when clean, healthful raw milk is virtually nonexistent is ridiculous. Healthy raw milk cannot be produced in the factory farm model, and traditional healthy farm practice has been extirpated by the USDA policies for most of a century by now. The regulatory system is as corrupt as it can be, protecting not the consumer but the industry.

Distanced as modern life has become from what is natural, healthy, and honorable, most of us living today have never seen a dairy cow out on pasture or even imagined one. Or tasted and recognized the wholesomeness of the milk from such cows.

Many’s the morning I have spent milking one of my handful of cows in a lush field of green grass, under blue sky, by hand into a clean pail; the bliss of the cow, her clean fragrant flank, the richness of the milk, and the happiness of both the farmer and the cow apparent.

We have many sorrows now, having pursued a world of convenience and profit. I have long since arrived at the conclusion that misery, and the fruits of misery, cannot be healthy. There’s nothing superior to the milk from happy, healthy cows, as far as I know. But chances are that you will never know it, never taste it, never find it. Vested interests in modern agriculture policy have seen to that.

If Robert Kennedy was capable of contributing something constructive to modern health, which I sincerely doubt, he might begin by rebuilding the vision of our schools of agriculture, restoring honorable practices, and fostering good animal stewardship to make it possible for competent small farmers to succeed, rather than making it impossible to do things right and good.