A Huge Raw Milk Producer Found Tons of Pathogens in Its Milk. So They Just Sold It as Cheese Instead.

People really shouldn’t need to be told that making commercial dairy products is an inherently dirty business, given that it’s contingent upon interaction with a cow that spends the majority of its day chewing cud, pooping wherever it stands, and then treading around in the leavings of hundreds of other cows. That is simply the daily life as a cow, and it’s no wonder that the array of bacteria dangerous to humans–salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, listeria–that is automatically present in the intestines and feces of a cow would stand a good chance of making its way into the milk they produce. It only takes a microscopic fleck of contaminant, after all, to eventually proliferate and make that dairy unsafe for people to drink, which is why through history, millions died of these diseases thanks to tainted dairy. Thankfully, Louis Pasteur gifted humanity with his namesake protective process of pasteurization in 1864, meaning that we as a species have known how to largely avoid dairy-borne pathogens since the time of the Civil War. But why avoid those pathogens, when even after identifying those them in lab samples, you can just make the infected milk into cheese instead, and hope that fixes the problem? After all, it’s only the threat of sepsis, kidney failure and death that you’re risking!

The contaminants-be-gone strategy described above is one that has been employed by California raw milk/raw cheese specialists Raw Farm, according to owner/RFK Jr. associate Mark McAfee–or at least, it’s what he reportedly told writer Annie Waldman this spring, during the reporting process for what turned into a sprawling investigative piece in ProPublica. Notably, McAfee’s description of the creative way for the business to repurpose contaminated raw milk by making it into raw cheese came only weeks before the FDA would confirm yet another instance of a food-borne pathogen outbreak linked to Raw Farm, this time in the company’s raw cheddar cheese. As we wrote about at the time, nine people across three states were infected with E. coli after consuming the Raw Farm cheese, including one person who developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can cause severe kidney damage and even death.

Mark McAfee, the owner of Raw Farm, has capitalized on a once-fringe product that’s been thrust into the mainstream in recent years.

While most experts agree raw milk has no proven nutritional benefits, more than 10 million Americans now drink it.

By @anniewaldman.bsky.social

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— ProPublica (@propublica.org) 11:00 PM · Jun 13, 2026

To get a feel for who we’re talking about here, this is a story that involves a man who once thought it was a good idea to say the following to a reporter: “I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered. But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer.”

And wouldn’t you know it? After Waldman contacted McAfee again in the wake of the E. coli outbreak–during which time Raw Farm outright refused to engage in a voluntarily recall despite the FDA’s request–McAfee had suddenly changed his mind about what kinds of practices his farm was using in the making of its cheese.

Here’s what McAfee reportedly said on the subject when interviewed by Waldman in February: “We catch these things and divert the milk immediately. We have a red-flag system here, with if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese. Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”

McAfee would later confirm to ProPublica that milk with pathogens was being used to make cheese with the exception of salmonella, which was instead being “dumped or sent out for pasteurization.” The company was relying on the cheese, meanwhile, to be rendered safe by the 60-day maturation/aging process that the cheese undergoes, during which time bacteria can be eliminated … but not always. Indeed, the company’s own lab records demonstrated that pathogens could remain in the raw cheese, in which case the product would need to be destroyed. One would think, though, that the sheer number of people who have gotten seriously ill after eating those products would point to the probability that some contaminated product is still making it to market. That’s what the FDA concluded in Feb. 2024, linking Raw Farm’s cheese to a monthslong E. coli outbreak across five states. At least one of the families involved in said outbreak is currently suing Raw Farm after a woman endured multiple kidney surgeries. At that time, the FDA told the business to “destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk,” with the farm contending that it had no “bad cheese” to throw out, and that its products had not in fact been responsible for sickening anyone.

After this March’s E. coli outbreak, McAfee sounded quite a bit different about the whole process, speaking with Waldman again. Six weeks after initially telling her about how they would divert contaminated milk to make cheese, he now said that “we would in the past divert to cheesemaking,” but “we no longer do,” saying only that “it’s been quite some time.” Pressed on the fact that he had just been telling the reporter something different only weeks earlier, McAfee said the following: “I think you have caught me in something where there’s an issue between practice and what I’m saying. If I said it, I believed that at the time to be true, but I do know that now we do not use any questionable milk.”

You almost have to admire the commitment to sociopathy of this corner of the MAGA/MAHA sphere, guys who in the space of only a few sentences can insist that a food production process is perfectly safe, but that they’re no longer using it regardless, but that they absolutely have the right to use it, should they so desire. It’s a perfect illustration of the push-pull dynamic between conventional business acumen (reassuring the consumer who might be concerned) and pathological narcissism that manifests in the inability to admit that you or your company could possibly have done anything wrong, along with the assumption that anyone attempting to safeguard public health is instead trying to destroy you personally. That’s how you end up with a company simultaneously insisting “we don’t use this process anymore,” but also refusing at the same time to voluntarily withdraw the product that made people sick because it used that process. There’s clearly no element of guilt involved, that’s for damn sure–as McAfee told Waldman about the entire latest E. Coli outbreak, “We don’t feel bad at all. Our sales are the highest they’ve ever been, and feedback online with influencers is: If the FDA says something, do the opposite. It’s safer. They don’t trust them at all.”

You might wonder, of course, why a federal agency like the FDA would put up with a business owner saying things like “if the FDA says something, do the opposite,” and the answer comes down to the agency’s own toothlessness, lack of bandwidth following DOGE-era cuts, and lack of desire to do anything on this specific topic, given its parent department of Health and Human Services being lorded over by a raw milk/dairy convert in RFK Jr., who has extolled its “healing powers” in the past. Various investigations from agencies like the FDA have yielded little to anything in terms of punishment or additional oversight, and the FDA closed its latest Raw Farm investigation on April 30, following the E. coli outbreak, without taking any enforcement action. This, from a man in McAfee who once said in the 2000s that if the government ever raided his farm, it would be “another Wounded Knee, Ruby Ridge or Waco.” Turns out it’s a lot easier to avoid violent conflict and gunfire with federal agents if you just wait for the conspiracists to completely take over the nation’s health apparatus.

So yeah: Raw Farm cheese ended up right back on the same store shelves, and any element of our federal government that might be interested in preserving the public health was quickly shut down from taking any action. In mid-April, RFK Jr. sat in front of a congressional subcommittee answering questions about the incident, and even though he referred to Raw Farm as “intransigent” in its refusal to voluntarily recall its product from shelves, he simultaneously defended their right to sell a product that might or might not contain contaminants. Representative Rosa DeLauro (CN) asked Kennedy the following: “You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Is there not some moral responsibility or compunction to say, “Don’t drink raw milk’?” Kennedy’s reply: “Every product can contain contaminants. What we do is inform the public, and we let people make the choice.”

This libertarian-like appeal to personal liberty always plays well to a certain crowd, but you know who it plays best to in the end? That would be people whose brains have already been overthrown by fake news and a preference for conspiracy, the most likely segment of Americans to Dunning-Kruger themselves into believing they understand complex topics when they in fact … do not.

The Trump administration has ceased all legal efforts against Raw Farm, which knowingly sold raw milk products containing pathogens.

"I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital," said Mark McAfee, the owner of Raw Farm. "But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer."

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— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 4:14 PM · Jun 10, 2026

As if appearing to prove the point, Waldman and ProPublica spoke to a 58-year-old raw milk evangelist from California attending a “Camping With the Cows” event at Raw Farm weeks after the E. coli outbreak, who insisted that despite the FDA’s confirmation of said outbreak, that the outbreak had actually never happened at all. Or as the woman put it: “The odds of it being true are slim to none. And people need to do their research.”

To that point, I suppose we grudgingly agree. If only a few more people researched cutting edge food preservation science from 1864, then there might be a bit less violent diarrhea and kidney damage going around.