Milk Takes Center Stage in 2025

By the end of the 20th century, it seemed like cow’s milk was over, along with scrunchies and network television. Soy and nut milks had moved from health-food shelves to the supermarket to Starbucks, and oat milk was waiting in the wings to take over the nation’s lattes.

But in 2024, U.S. consumption of whole milk rose by 3.2 percent — only the second increase since the 1970s — while consumption of plant milk fell 5.9 percent, according to data from Circana, a market research firm. Sales of dairy milk overall were up 1.9 percent, and sales of raw milk spiked by 17.6 percent.

“For dairy milk to be growing at all is surprising, much less by these numbers,” said John Crawford, Circana’s dairy expert. “This reverses trends that have been in place for decades.”

Americans have long had a turbulent relationship with milk. It was a public-health menace of the 19th century, a patriotic staple of the mid-20th century, and a nutritional, ethical and environmental conundrum in the 21st. Yet another shift is underway.

As the raw-milk enthusiast Robert F. Kennedy Jr. awaits confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary, milk is poised to have a very strange 2025.

It is suddenly a political battleground, as the nascent Make America Healthy Again movement wields unpasteurized milk in the fight against big government, big food and big pharma.

Dairy aisles are already brimming with new options and ideologies: organic, humanely raised, ultrafiltered, caffeinated, protein-enhanced and many more. (Darigold, a dairy giant based in the Northwest, has so many variations that the basic product is now labeled “Classic Milk.”)

And milk is culturally inescapable: We’ve watched Nicole Kidman down a full glass of it in a cocktail bar for an erotic jolt in “Babygirl”; the cosmetics mogul Hailey Baldwin Bieber pour it over her body in ads for Glazing Milk, her blockbuster moisturizer; and the popular influencer and dairy farmer Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm feed raw milk to her eight children on TikTok.

How did milk stage such an unlikely comeback?

Many Americans’ ideas of healthy eating were shaped by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 1992 food pyramid, which remained unchanged until 2005. Concerns about fat, cholesterol and sugar put milk near the top, at just two to three servings per day.

Now milk is back in nutritional favor, as Americans’ priorities have shifted toward hydration, protein and healthy fats. A high-profile 2008 study — partly funded by the dairy industry — showed that chocolate milk’s benefits for athletes were equivalent to or better than those of lab-concocted performance drinks like Gatorade. Follow-up studies have continued to show similar results, helping to rebrand milk as a natural nutrition powerhouse.

Plant milks have lost ground because they’re expensive, but also because of their long ingredient lists, often including sweeteners, emulsifiers and stabilizers. That places many of them in the category of ultraprocessed foods, which health-conscious and science-skeptical Americans are learning to avoid.

Search interest in cow milk continues to grow, according to Google Trends data. Late last year, searches for “whole milk” surpassed searches for “oat milk” for the first time since 2020.

On social media, Gen Z consumers who grew up with plant milks seem to be encountering “real” milk for the first time.

Peggy Xu used to post wide-ranging food content on TikTok, but it was only once she began drinking whole milk on camera that her following took off. In videos tagged #milktok, she presents unhomogenized milk in glass bottles, showing off the big caps of cream that sit on top.

She has had to explain the basics to her viewers: that homogenization is the process that distributes the cream evenly through the milk, and that pasteurization is the heating process that kills bacteria. (She doesn’t drink raw milk.)

“People were so curious,” said Ms. Xu, 26. “They don’t know what milk is anymore.”

Some social media influencers are filling that void of understanding with claims that raw milk is both safe and superior to pasteurized milk.

Calling it a nutritionally complete “superfood” packed with probiotics and enzymes, wellness influencers document their “cleanses” from plant-based milks, consuming nothing but raw milk for a week or more.

Chris Costagli, the head of food thought leadership for Nielsen IQ, said the company’s data confirmed a 4.4 percent drop in plant milk sales in the year ending last September. Raw milk, he said, is unlikely to return to the mainstream American diet, but products that incorporate raw milk, like artisanal cheeses, yogurt and kefir, are “steadily gaining traction.”

Raw milk does contain probiotic bacteria, but it can also contain dangerous strains of salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter and listeria. Public health officials are particularly alarmed by the recent spread of H5N1, a strain of avian flu that has been transmitted to humans, mainly dairy workers, through milk. Raw milk is banned from interstate commerce but licensed for sale in some states, and can be used in dairy products in accordance with Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

Until the 20th century, milk was a perpetual threat to public health. In 1858, after an investigation into the deaths of thousands of infants in the city, The New York Times thundered that unpasteurized, adulterated milk was a danger “becoming intolerable to civilized society.”

As the century progressed, the United States moved steadily toward the goal of pasteurized, homogenized, vitamin D-fortified milk for all.

The steady supply of milk was believed to make Americans taller, stronger, healthier, thinner, curvier and generally fitter to lead the new world. President Herbert Hoover told the World Dairy Congress in 1923, “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depend on it the very growth and virility of the white race.”

Milk has often been linked to notions of purity, whiteness, fertility and femininity. Long before Marie Antoinette and her court cosplayed as milkmaids in a white marble cowshed at Versailles for the pleasure of the men watching, milk conjured erotic associations.

(The tradwives of their time, aristocratic women in the court of Louis XVI were nudged by the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to renounce city life, with its trivial and impure diversions, live in the country and breastfeed their children.)

Now that American political culture has renewed its embrace of “traditional” roles for women, milking is sexy again. The corseted milkmaid look was front and center in a white dress worn by Ms. Neeleman on the December cover of Evie, a new conservative women’s magazine.

Brittany Martinez, the founder and editor in chief of Evie, said the company produced a limited-supply of the frock — called “the raw milkmaid dress” after a frenzy of demand from readers. Raw milk is part of the “return to nature” that Evie’s readers are yearning for, Ms. Martinez said, and the milkmaid dress appeals because of its “beautiful silhouette.”

“I think men love seeing women in classically feminine dresses because they’re simply flattering and more rare to see in our modern world,” she said.

Sara Petersen, a cultural critic who has documented the rise of the tradwife archetype, said the milkmaid dress plays into the fantasy that women can be sexy and modest, innocent and nurturing, all at the same time.

“It’s very Madonna-whore,” Ms. Petersen said, adding: “Milk is always connected to nourishment, and it’s always the mother who holds the mantle of responsibility.”

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