The administration claims its whole-milk reversal is about youngsters’s well being, however the coverage could solely serve to advance its political agenda.
President Donald Trump speaks throughout a signing ceremony within the Oval Workplace of the White Home on January 14, 2026. Trump signed laws permitting faculties that take part in a federal lunch program to serve entire milk.
(Francis Chung / Politico / Bloomberg)
A10-foot pink latex udder is dangling from the ceiling because the smoke machine kicks again on. A remix of “By no means Too A lot” by Luther Vandross is hitting. A mirror displays a sea of all-white outfits.
Final 12 months, I discovered myself at a milk-themed basement dance occasion. On the time, maybe, I ought to have rotated on the dance floor: I might have discovered an AI-generated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. behind me, swaying whereas sipping a glass of the white stuff.
The unique invite for the party featured a black-and-white portrait of a gaunt little one in wartime hugging bottles of milk. It wasn’t laborious to seek out an older model of the boy within the room, dancing poorly to deal with music in a milkman costume, grinding on the milkmaid.
A 12 months later, Donald Trump would deploy a model of the identical imagery to proclaim his nationwide plan to “Make Entire Milk Nice Once more.”
In January, President Trump signed a invoice permitting faculties that take part in federal lunch packages to as soon as once more serve entire milk and a pair of p.c milk, reversing Obama-era restrictions aimed toward lowering childhood weight problems by limiting choices to skim and low-fat. What adopted was a rapid-fire public relations blitz: authorities companies, conservative lawmakers, and wellness influencers declaring that milk—actual milk—was again.
The entire-milk coverage will not be a lot a dietary correction as a political calling card. It’s an deliberately low-stakes transfer that, in a matter of weeks, performatively flipped years of public-health steerage to sign alignment with Trump’s voting bloc: agribusiness, Make America Wholesome Once more fundamentalists, biohackers, and reactionaries.
Present Concern
“Trump has been capable of get all these individuals on this massive coalition [that] haven’t any connection,” mentioned Fabio Parasecoli, professor of meals research at New York College. “Apart from the truth that via Trump, they get entry to energy.”
Simply days earlier, the Well being and Human Companies secretary flipped the meals pyramid actually the other way up, putting entire milk (and meat) close to the highest. As The New York Occasions reported, a minimum of three of the 9 specialists who helped RFK Jr. make the brand new pyramid had monetary ties to dairy {industry} organizations, together with the Nationwide Dairy Council.
The hassle to push dairy—particularly to youngsters—is barely the newest chapter within the relationship between the US authorities and milk producers.
After World Struggle II, dairy manufacturing surged to help the conflict effort, then overshot demand as soon as peace arrived. The Nationwide Faculty Lunch Act of 1946 helped take in the excess, embedding milk into the every day lives of American youngsters.
Within the Seventies, dealing with one more glut, the federal authorities started buying extra milk and changing it into cheese; inside a decade, it was sitting on tons of of million kilos of it. Unable to discover a market resolution, the federal government distributed the excess—typically moldy—to meals pantries and low-income households.
However as time went on, Individuals nonetheless stored ingesting much less and fewer milk per day. America Division of Agriculture estimates that between 1970 and 2019, milk consumption per day dropped almost 50 p.c. Milk ingesting general decreased greater than 10 p.c in simply the last decade between 2014 and 2024, with the steepest drop in consumption coming from youngsters, according to the company.
In style
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In recent times, plant-based options surged in coffeeshops and grocery aisles, main the dairy foyer to launch a counteroffensive. The dairy checkoff—an industry-funded advertising and marketing equipment—leaned into influencer tradition, recruiting a “Dairy Dream Team,” together with Mr. Beast. Protein-packed manufacturers like Fairlife have been recast as functional wellness merchandise.
It might have made a dent. In 2024, consumption of entire milk rose 3.2 p.c, whereas plant milk consumption dropped almost 6 p.c, marking the third consecutive 12 months of decline.
The rise in milk gross sales comes on the heels of fearmongering across the consumption of milk options, significantly for males. Round 2017, the derogatory time period “soy boy,” meant to mock males who consumed soy merchandise, rose to recognition on Web boards and chatrooms. Scientifically doubtful however nicely publicized research affiliate the consumption of soy-based merchandise like tofu, edamame, and soy milk with a lower in testosterone ranges and feminization. Nondairy milk turned shorthand for wokeness.
In recent times, as politicians and the mainstream media fermented worry round a disaster of masculinity, “milk turned the expression of that,” mentioned Parasecoli. “It’s a very good instance of what I name ‘gastronativism,’ when meals is utilized in politics as an ideological instrument to create boundaries between us and them.”
The sample will not be new. Within the nineteenth century, some American medical doctors boasted that the American weight loss program of eggs, milk, and dairy merchandise was a panacea for a scarcity of “mental vigor” discovered within the “effeminate rice-eaters” of the non-Western world. In 1884, J. Leonard Corning, who performed a task in inventing the epidural, prescribed milk and meat for “cerebral exhaustion” for these exterior of the Anglo-Saxon race.
In 1923, future president Herbert Hoover proclaimed whereas addressing the World Dairy Congress that the dairy {industry}, greater than every other of the meals industries, is crucial not just for public well being however for the “very progress and virility of the white race.”
Milk is white in colour and sometimes in consumption. Roughly 68 p.c of the world’s population has a point of lactose intolerance. These from Northern Europe digest milk with probably the most ease.
However to declare that milk consumption in and of itself is racist is a kind of tradition conflict decoy.
Not lengthy after the time period “soy boy” went mainstream in 2017, dairy made headlines after white supremacists took over Shia LaBeouf’s anti-Trump social experiment livestream project and chugged gallons of milk on digital camera whereas chanting racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slogans. Trump supporters started bringing milk to rallies and alt-right allies like Richard Spencer added milk-bottle emojis to their on-line profiles. Those that “can’t drink milk” ought to “return,” wrote 4chan customers. One other cultural touchstone that linked milk with racism symbolically that 12 months was Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which showcased its villain consuming her cereal dry and ingesting her milk individually via a straw.
Trump’s whole-milk coverage is a decoy not not like the honeypot in Peele’s film—culturally legible to these primed to listen to it.
In response to the USDA’s #DrinkWholeMilk promotional video, customers on-line have been fast to level out the eerie really feel of solemn-looking white youngsters, spilling milk on their drab, grey wartime-style garb.
Derek Beres, writer of Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracies Turned a Well being Menace, sees the milk push as a part of a broader sample throughout the administration.
“That’s Kennedy’s MO. That’s Youngsters’s Well being Protection,” mentioned Beres, referring to Kennedy’s antivax nonprofit. “They are saying it’s about their well being, however they’re actually utilizing them as cudgels for their very own political agenda,” because the well being secretary has already carried out by rolling again many vaccines indiscriminately for youngsters.
MAHA-aligned teams have already celebrated the whole-milk reversal as a proof of idea. Since Trump’s election and RFK Jr.’s failed presidential run, corporations like Sweetgreen and Steak ’n Shake have accommodated the motion’s calls for, rolling out beef-tallow fries and seed-oil-free ranch dressing. Kennedy has stopped wanting endorsing uncooked milk outright—he declined to nominate Uncooked Milk Institute founder Mark McAfee to an FDA advisory function—however the energy of the MAHA and Trump coalition is obvious.
“MAHA is only one letter away from MAGA,” Beres mentioned. “The techniques are the identical: flood the zone, confuse individuals, and preserve them from specializing in the truth that tens of hundreds of thousands are about to lose well being protection.”
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