America’s Raw-Cheddar Chaos

Raw Farm does not sell your typical cheddar. A one-pound block of the aged, GMO-free cheese retails for $16. (Naturally, it’s for sale at Erewhon, the high-end grocery chain.) Some people are willing to pay that kind of premium because the cheese is made exclusively from unpasteurized milk. So is almost everything else that’s sold by Raw Farm, a 400-acre dairy farm in Fresno, California, that is commonly cited as the country’s biggest purveyor of raw milk and cheese. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president in 2024, his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, visited Raw Farm and filmed herself on a tour of the milking operations. Raw Farm has carved a very successful niche out of the unfounded belief that raw milk and cheese are more nutritious than the regular stuff.

Pasteurization exists for a reason: It is a time-tested way to make sure that dairy products don’t contain bacteria that can make you sick. And now Raw Farm has found itself in the middle of an E. coli outbreak. The FDA is pointing to Raw Farm’s cheddar cheese as the reason nine people—including multiple children under the age of 5—have fallen ill. Three of the individuals have been hospitalized, and one has developed a serious kidney condition. Regulators have asked Raw Farm to recall the product. Yet the company has refused to do so. Grocery stores are still carrying the cheddar.

A maxim of food safety is that when the government says your product is making people sick, you stop selling it. Sometimes companies are in a “state of shock and disbelief,” Frank Yiannas, a former deputy FDA commissioner who was previously the vice president of food safety at Walmart, told me. “They can’t imagine that it’s truly their product.” In the history of the modern FDA, essentially every company implicated in a foodborne outbreak has agreed to a recall—until now. Democrats in Congress have even tried to place pressure on Raw Farm to pull the product off shelves, but the company is not backing down.

[Read: The real appeal of raw milk]

In this cheddar chaos, Raw Farm has painted itself as the victim. When I spoke with Aaron McAfee, the company’s president, he was quick to note that he takes safety very seriously. Raw Farm has voluntarily recalled its products at the FDA’s urging more than a dozen times. In 2024, Raw Farm immediately pulled its cheddar cheese after it was linked to E. coli. (The company subsequently wrote on its website that the recall was “UNFOUNDED.”) This time, however, the request “just felt wrong,” McAfee told me. He insists that the government’s case is based on “circumstantial evidence” and that his company isn’t at fault. None of Raw Farm’s cheddar has actually tested positive for E. coli.

Food-safety investigations are messy. Regulators need to move quickly to prevent more people from getting sick. Companies are often asked to voluntarily initiate a recall before the government can actually prove that a product is unsafe. At times, the FDA does shift its focus to other foods: In 2008, the agency warned consumers not to eat tomatoes suspected to be contaminated with Salmonella, but it later identified serrano peppers as the likely cause of the illnesses.

Still, food-safety experts I spoke with were emphatic that the FDA is probably correct about Raw Farm’s cheddar. Despite the lack of a positive test that the cheese is contaminated, the agency has two facts to rely on: The E. coli strains from all of the patients are closely related, suggesting that they came from the same product. Second, of the eight people who investigators have been able to interview, seven confirmed that they consumed Raw Farm’s dairy products. “The statistical likelihood of that just being pure chance is almost zero,” Yiannas said.

The agency does have the legal power to force Raw Farm’s cheese off the market through a legal maneuver known as a mandatory recall. Such a move has little precedent. In 2018, the FDA forced a mandatory recall of a brand’s kratom supplement, which had been contaminated with Salmonella. But the FDA would likely be in a tougher situation this time around. The kratom seller didn’t fight the mandatory recall, but Raw Farm would. McAfee told me that he had asked the FDA to pursue a mandatory recall because it would give him the opportunity to appeal. “I was not granted due process,” he said. (Companies can request an “informal hearing” to discuss the order.)

Exactly why the FDA hasn’t moved forward with a mandatory recall is unclear. (I asked a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. The spokesperson referred me to only what the FDA has already said publicly about the case.) The agency could still be gathering the necessary evidence to justify such a step. Or perhaps Kennedy doesn’t want to declare a mandatory recall: He said shortly before his nomination as HHS secretary that the FDA’s alleged “war” on raw milk must end. McAfee claimed that Kennedy is a Raw Farm customer but that he has “not heard anything from D.C.”

[Read: America’s real ‘secretary of war’]

Even if the FDA eventually pushes Raw Farm to pull its products off the shelves—whether voluntarily or through force—that may not be the end of this saga. The reality is that we might never know with 100 percent certainty what caused those nine people to get sick. And doubt about the dangers of unpasteurized products is a reason they are so popular in the first place. The business of raw milk is based on convincing people that the milk is worth consuming despite objections from the FDA that it has no proven benefits over conventional pasteurized products and that it comes with an outsize risk of making you sick. If people found the FDA credible, a company like Raw Farm wouldn’t exist.

During my conversation with McAfee, it was easy to see why people might believe him more than they would a nameless bureaucrat. He talked about trusting his cheese so much that he feeds it to his daughter, and he cited FDA regulations like a trained lawyer. When we spoke, he was quick to emphasize all of the tests his company had done to ensure that the cheese was safe, and he referenced the company’s food-safety plan, which spans five binders.

People experiment with all kinds of products because they trust unproven anecdotes over government warnings. But the fact that a company is willing to risk more people falling sick from E. coli because of a belief that the FDA can’t be trusted should be a much bigger wake-up call for the agency. By McAfee’s telling, Raw Farm is the subject of a “witch hunt.” The FDA has the power to regulate the food supply with an iron fist, but its job has historically been much easier because companies have faith that the agency is doing what it can to stop an outbreak. That is no longer a guarantee.