Even before James Stewart, the leader of the milk-trafficking gang known as the Rawesome Three, hired an attorney from one of the top marijuana-defense firms in Los Angeles, the analogy was plain: raw milk is the new pot, only harder to get. For more than a year, Rawesome, a members-only food club that Stewart ran from a lot in Venice, California, was the subject of a nine-agency investigation, in which undercover agents infiltrated the network of dairy dealers supplying the club. (Count 3, Overt Act 12: “ ‘Deb’ is in beige colored Ford van . . . When ‘Customer WardKennedy’ asks for his order, ‘Deb’ searches through five ice coolers in the back of the van and pulls out the water-soaked order: six unlabeled containers of raw dairy products.”) The operatives, including the feared California Department of Food and Agriculture investigator Scarlett Treviso (code-named La Rue), mingled with customers and, using what Stewart’s lawyer said were “purse cams and pole cams,” photographed Rawesome’s cooler, dry-goods trailer, and open-air produce market. They also took pictures from the street: members passing through a large corrugated metal gate with a sign that read “Rawesome Foods—Raw and Organic—Out of the Ordinary and Downright Extraordinary.”

Raw-milk advocates and regulators are increasingly in conflict. “It’s a massive food fight,” a farmer said. Photograph by Chris Buck

Rawesome, an expensive, all-cash specialty store devoted to radically unprocessed food, attracted a clientele of health-seekers, yoginis, celebrities, and the seriously ill. At Rawesome they could buy provisions that were otherwise inaccessible: unheated honey from the Bolivian highlands (outside the fallout range of the A-bomb tests), sun-dried cashews from Bali, raw cow colostrum, goat whey, and camel milk from a dairy selling it for “craft use.” In the meat cooler, there were raw bison kidneys, spleen, hearts, and testicles, which customers often sliced open and ate on the spot. “We had some real vampires going through there,” a former Rawesome worker, who lived for a time in a shipping container on the lot, said. “Everyone wanted to suck the cow’s udder.” Liv Tyler and Mandy Moore shopped there occasionally. Mariel Hemingway was a regular, as were Peta Wilson and Vincent Gallo. Fred Segal, the boutique owner, ordered a box of food every week, and John Cusack’s personal chef, Rawesome workers said, was forbidden to shop anywhere else.

Early on the morning of August 3rd, as one of the coconut juicers—known around Rawesome for their stoned demeanor and their unsocialized way of wearing mud masks in public—started extracting the day’s supply, there was a knock at the gate. Outside, more than a dozen agents from the F.D.A., the county health department, and the Franchise Tax Board had assembled, in raid jackets and tactical vests; armed L.A.P.D. officers provided security. Stewart, a robust sixty-four-year-old with a beachcomber’s mustache and a wardrobe of Hawaiian shirts, was arrested and put in handcuffs. He had nine thousand dollars in his pocket, because he’d been planning to go downtown to pick up merchandise. His fruit money was entered into evidence. Over the next several hours, a crowd of about a hundred Rawesome members gathered to watch as agents loaded produce onto a flatbed truck. When the agents dumped some eight hundred gallons of raw dairy down the kitchen drain, members wept.

The same day, the police rounded up the rest of the Rawesome Three. In Santa Paula, sixty miles away, they hit Healthy Family Farms, a small operation that supplied the club with poultry, eggs, and, for a time, raw goat products from a forty-head herd that Rawesome boarded there. The farmer, Sharon Palmer, a single parent who manages the farm with her three teen-agers, was arrested. A fifty-nine-year-old graphic designer named Eugenie Victoria Bloch, a Rawesome member who helped sell Palmer’s products at farmers’ markets, was also arrested, outside her home in Los Angeles. Stewart, Palmer, and Bloch were charged with felony counts of conspiracy; Stewart and Palmer were charged with an additional two felonies, for running an unlicensed milk plant and processing milk products without pasteurization, and with various misdemeanors, including counts of poor sanitation and improper labelling. (All three pleaded not guilty to all the charges.) Stewart’s bail was set at a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars, with the stipulation, common in drug cases, that he be held until the court could ascertain that the bail was not “feloniously obtained”—high stakes for a grocer.

At a hearing in October, thirty supporters wearing white T-shirts that read “RAW MILK HEALS” gathered outside the courtroom. Many were baffled by what had befallen their neighborhood market. “Rawesome was an intelligent local food ecosystem. It was alive, and it was regulating itself on a level so far beyond what the U.S.D.A. or the F.D.A. means when it says ‘food safety,’ ” Camilla Griggers, who teaches English at a nearby college, said. “That we would be dragged through the court system on a food-safety issue is so laughable. Rawesome was a gourmet club par excellence of the best food you could get anywhere in the world.”

Raw milk stirs the hedonism of food lovers in a special way. Because it is not heated or homogenized and often comes from animals raised on pasture, it tends to be richer and sweeter, and, sometimes, to retain a whiff of the farm—the slightly discomfiting flavor known to connoisseurs as “cow butt.” “Pasteurization strips away layers of complexity, layers of aromatics,” Daniel Patterson, a chef who has used raw milk to make custard and eggless ice cream at Coi, his two-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, said. “Right now, at the beginning of spring, the milk is at its sweetest. The cows are getting a lot of herbs that are really verdant and green, and the milk has a higher fat content.” Another respected California chef, who uses raw cream to make butter, ice cream, and a cajeta he describes as “haunting,” told me, “Dairy is the single most delicate and sensitive indicator of terroir I have encountered. When you take milk or cream and pasteurize it and homogenize it, you’ve killed the originality.” He helped a nearby farmer buy three cows (from a breed carefully picked for the character of its milk) and is part of a small herd share, an agreement of uncertain legality whereby consumers own a percentage of a herd and are entitled to a certain amount of the milk. The chef said that his farmer insisted on cash payments, no paper trail. “Only recently have they allowed receipts to go through my bookkeeper, but even now we don’t say what it’s for,” he told me. “We say ‘cow services.’ ”

The new wave of refined American cuisine has a regressive side, wrapped up in nostalgia for an imagined past. Never mind the immersion circulators and the hydrocolloids; progressive cooking is an act of recovery. Patterson, who is both a kitchen technologist and a forager, told me, “We make a huge effort at Coi to look like we’re making no effort at all.” To chefs like him, unprocessed milk does not just taste better; it is sentimental and, more important, it is pure. “Raw milk is a primary touchstone of that sort of agrarian, old-fashioned way of life,” Patterson said.

Suspicion of technology has long been associated with the raw-milk movement. In the nineteen-thirties, a Cleveland dentist named Weston A. Price travelled around the world studying isolated populations experiencing their first exposure to “the displacing foods of modern commerce.” In “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,” which has become a central text for the movement, he wrote that people who ate unprocessed, indigenous foods had strong teeth, regular bone structure, and over-all good health, whereas those who had adopted an American diet—refined sugar, white flour, pasteurized and skim milk, and hydrogenated oils—had cavities, facial deformities, and other problems, which they passed along to their children.

Advocates of raw milk hold that pasteurization kills enzymes that make food digestible and bacteria that contribute to a healthy immune system. Drinking raw milk, they say, confers numerous health benefits—vitality, digestive vigor, strong teeth, clear skin—and even has the power to treat serious ailments, such as diabetes, cancer, and autism. Sally Fallon Morell, the founder of an advocacy group informed by Price’s work, recommends feeding raw milk to infants. Carola Caldwell, a registered nurse who drove several hours from Lake Arrowhead to shop at Rawesome, overrode years of medical training to feed her son raw milk and meat. She told me that the diet had cured him of extreme allergies, chemical sensitivity, and moodiness. “Within three weeks of starting raw food, he became a different child,” she said.

There has been little science to support these claims. The closest thing to an objective body of data appeared last August, with the publication of a large-sample study linking children’s consumption of unheated “farm milk” to reduced rates of asthma and allergies. The researchers, based in Europe, where raw milk is more widely accepted, determined that whey protein was the protective element, but they stopped short of advising people to consume raw milk, because of the risk of pathogens. The next step, they wrote, would be to develop “ways of processing and preserving a safe and preventive milk.”

Milk—rich in protein, low in acid—is one of the best growth mediums on the planet. Bacteria love it. Unpasteurized milk can carry salmonella, campylobacter, and E. coli O157:H7, the strain that came to public attention in the nineties, when four children died after eating contaminated meat at Jack in the Box. Listeria has been traced to queso-fresco-style raw-milk cheeses, sometimes known as “bathtub cheese,” a reference to unsanitary home-production methods. A study published by the C.D.C. in February found that pathogens in raw milk can be especially harmful to children and others with weakened immune systems; in the sixty raw-dairy outbreaks between 1993 and 2006 in which the victims’ ages were known, two-thirds were younger than twenty. Only a small fraction of the population—between one and three per cent—drinks raw milk, and fewer than two hundred cases of foodborne illness are attributed to it each year. Still, its popularity is rising, which is a great concern to regulators. The C.D.C. study reported that raw dairy was a hundred and fifty times more likely than pasteurized products to cause an outbreak.

Pasteurization was introduced to the American dairy industry to solve a crisis. By the mid-nineteenth century, most of the milk available in cities was supplied by “swill dairies”: stables built alongside distilleries, where cows were fed macerated grain left over from the production of whiskey. The spent grains boosted milk production temporarily, but left the cows—confined to dirty, crowded pens—malnourished and prone to disease. In 1858, the Times published an editorial titled “How We Poison Our Children,” decrying the “bluish, white compound of true milk, pus and dirty water” and blaming swill milk for eight thousand infant deaths in the city the previous year. Four years later, Louis Pasteur came up with a heat treatment to kill bacteria in wine, and his method was soon applied to milk. When Nathan Straus, a co-owner of Macy’s, set up depots where poor families could get pasteurized milk at discounted prices, the number of New York City babies dying dropped precipitously.

What began as an argument for treating milk produced under unsanitary conditions became an argument for treating all milk. Speaking at the Pasteur Institute in 1905, the director of the depots read a statement from Straus saying, “It is milk—raw milk, diseased milk—which is responsible for the largest percentage of sickness in the world. . . . I hold that the only safe rule is—Pasteurize the entire milk supply and make it a function of the municipality.” Raw-milk sales are now illegal in eleven states and permitted in a number of others only through herd-share agreements and on-farm sales; in four states, it can be sold only as pet food. Since 1987, when Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen sued the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit interstate commerce in raw milk, it has been a crime to transport it for sale across state lines. The resulting underground market is by definition unregulated; consumers must take it on faith that the milk is clean, something that, without testing, even the farmer can’t know for sure. Good standards for inspection and proper labelling could significantly reduce the likelihood of outbreaks, but for now the two sides—those who call for unfettered access and those who completely oppose it—are deadlocked. “The conversation needs to start with really solid facts about the incidence of bacteria in raw milk,” Jo Robinson, an investigative journalist who runs the Web site Eat Wild, says. “We’re not doing enough to reduce those risks.”

Raw milk has always been legal in California, but the preponderance of regulation has made it hard to come by. In the late nineties, not long after James Stewart started selling raw milk, the state’s largest provider shut down its raw operation, leaving, by Stewart’s count, eight licensed raw-milk cows in California. As he searched for new supplies, he heard from Mark McAfee, a former paramedic who had inherited his grandparents’ farm, in Fresno. “I called up James and said, ‘I’ve got two hundred and fifty cows here, all certified organic or on grass,’ ” McAfee told me. “He says, ‘I’ll be there in three hours.’ ” According to McAfee, Stewart single-handedly rebuilt the market for raw milk in Southern California, and introduced him to the nutritionist Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a former “General Hospital” actor who claims to have cured himself of multiple cancers by eating a diet of raw meat, eggs, and milk, and sharply restricting his water intake. (Vonderplanitz, who calls his approach the Primal Diet, says that for a treat he bleeds meat into raw milk: “Tastes like ice cream!”) Vonderplanitz became an investor in the farm, and his followers became McAfee’s customers. Organic Pastures is now, by McAfee’s estimation, the largest raw dairy in the world, with four hundred and thirty cows. It produces twenty-four hundred gallons of milk a day, which retails for sixteen dollars a gallon.

On a chilly day in November, I drove out to Organic Pastures with McAfee, an energetic, trim man who was wearing a thick parka and clean bluejeans. “When people start drinking raw milk, it’s like this awakening,” he said. “It’s a phenomenally transforming immune-system food that is largely oppressed, suppressed, ignored, vilified, hated by processors and those that are involved with the structure of the American Dairy Association,” he said. “It’s a massive food fight.”

That day, McAfee was waiting for the state to lift a monthlong embargo on his milk. For the second time in five years, Organic Pastures had been implicated in an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. Five young children had fallen ill; three were hospitalized and treated for hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can lead to kidney failure. The same strain had been found in his calving pen, and he had instituted new safety procedures at the farm. Still, the embargo was costing him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a week, and he felt that the state was bleeding him intentionally. The recall had driven the price of raw milk in some stores up to forty dollars a gallon, with priority going to mothers. “We’ve been trying to keep the peace with all of our consumers,” he told me.

McAfee pulled into the farm and stopped beside a village of neat trailers: an office, a retail store, and a creamery, where hundreds of bottles stood waiting to be sent out. He talked with a manager, and said grimly, “It looks like we won’t be getting released today.” We drove down an unpaved road, past McAfee’s house, a large Mediterranean spread with a pool, a pair of pet goats, and a hangar where he keeps a plane. In the dairy barn, a row of cows with steaming, swollen undercarriages lined up to be milked. Workers hosed them down—manure is a major potential source of pathogens—then stripped their teats with iodine. The state requires frequent testing, and McAfee takes expensive precautions to keep the milk clean. But, he said, “Manure is the carrier of the beneficial bacteria found in raw milk. The whole pasteurization community does not understand that at all.”

In recent years, people have been drinking less milk, instead choosing alternatives like soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, and other beverages. At the same time, prices for feed and fuel have escalated, and many dairies have gone out of business. There has been a spate of dairyman suicides, several of them in California. But, since McAfee’s last E. coli recall, in 2006, when six children got sick after drinking his products, Organic Pastures has grown steadily. McAfee is doing far better than most of his pasteurizing counterparts; the company, he says, has sold nearly eight million dollars’ worth of milk products in the past year.

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Many public-health workers are puzzled by the raw-milk phenomenon. The F.D.A. “strongly advises against the consumption of raw milk,” maintaining that there is no nutritional advantage and a great health risk; John Sheehan, the agency’s director of dairy food safety, has likened it to “playing Russian roulette with your health.” Gevork Kazanchyan, a former Los Angeles County health inspector who teaches food safety and sanitation, told me, “We know this food can contain a hazard that is possibly life-altering; it’s the extremity of the hazard that governs the response to it. There is a population that is particularly vulnerable, and these are the ones who are fed raw milk. We have this thing—pasteurization—that works. You’re choosing to go around it. We can’t give carte blanche.”

But embracing bacteria is part of the raw-milk ethos. In order to shop at Rawesome, you had to sign an agreement saying that you preferred your food to “contain microbes, including but not limited to salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, listeria, gangrene and parasites” and liked your eggs “completely unrefrigerated and unwashed from the chicken and covered with bacteria and poultry feces.” Members not only rejected government food-safety standards as inapplicable to their nutritional requirements; they found them to be dangerous, because they allow for food to be treated with radiation and antibacterial chemicals. In an earlier raid on Rawesome, in 2010, the California Department of Food and Agriculture took samples of cheese made by a dairy in Missouri and found that they tested positive for trace amounts of listeria. “We told them we threw it out, but I don’t think we did,” a former U.S.D.A. employee who worked at Rawesome for two years told me. “Listeria really didn’t matter.”

Milk, be it human or cow, is the first food to which most humans are exposed; it is unlike other products both for consumers, who associate it with basic nourishment, and for regulators, who see its oversight as a grave responsibility. Michele Jay-Russell, of the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at U.C. Davis, said, “From a public-health perspective, milk has fallen into the category of water. Providing a clean milk and water supply is fundamental to what the government sees as its job. If the government were stopping people from selling impure water, it’s hard to imagine there would be a great public outcry.” But Jay-Russell acknowledges the frustration of consumers who can’t get a product that they feel they need. “The crux of the conundrum is: why shouldn’t it be their choice?”

One winter morning, with a heavy fog lying over Los Angeles, the Dairy Fairy, a Rawesome member who quietly assumed Stewart’s procurement responsibilities after the bust, got in her car and headed for the drop. Every week, she takes orders from the Rawesome diaspora for raw dairy, sauerkraut, and meat, most of it transported from out of state in truck space rented from a large produce operation. To compensate her for her time, she is given a box of groceries, which is meaningful, since she works freelance, and she and her boyfriend spend about five hundred dollars a week on food. (Their dog eats raw, too.)

Since August, the drop had gone down in public parks across the city, but the Dairy Fairy had decided that was too risky. One day, at a convenience store, she noticed a man selling cars off the lot. “I was like, That’s kind of shady,” she said. “So I went and talked to the owner. He said, ‘I’m from Egypt—I love raw milk!’ I trade him milk for us to park our truck here.” The beauty of the location, she said, is that trucks come and go all day long; no one notices the milk truck, unmarked and inconspicuous, parked in a corner of the lot.

The truck was waiting when she arrived. A young couple popped out; the woman had a pixie cut and was wearing knee-high yellow-and-black athletic socks from a CrossFit gym. The man helped the Dairy Fairy unload from her trunk two cases of black-market raw butter, made with cream from a nonfat-yogurt operation in New England, which sold for sixteen dollars a pound. “This stuff is sacred!” the Dairy Fairy said. The butter-maker, she said, demanded that they rendezvous in strange spots to make the handoff: cash up front for butter. The last time, it had been at LAX. This time, she had had to meet him by the side of the road in Pasadena.