Influencer content promoting the consumption of raw milk has grown prolific online, even as outbreaks of foodborne illnesses linked to unpasteurized dairy have recently sickened consumers across the country.
Social media personas like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman and Lauryn Bosstick of The Skinny Confidential routinely claim benefits from drinking milk that hasn’t been pasteurized. A video of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doing raw milk “shooters” in the White House with podcaster Dr. Paul Saladino, dubbed the “carnivore MD,” went viral in May.
And another popular influencer offers a particularly wild take on pasteurization stemming from a Chicago-area case of large-scale foodborne illness that plagued the nation 40 years ago.
A raw milk enthusiast known as Gubba Homestead, who has roughly 2 million followers on Instagram, claims in a video that one of the largest salmonella outbreaks in the United States, which originated at an Illinois farm in 1985, actually stemmed from pasteurized milk.
“Not raw milk,” the content creator concludes before taking a big gulp from a glass of milk that’s presumably unpasteurized.
The brief recording highlighted a scary time in Chicago-area history: Four decades ago, a multistate salmonella epidemic traced to milk from a Melrose Park farm sickened an estimated 168,000 to 197,000 people across the Midwest, according to Tribune articles at the time. The public health crisis was linked to around a dozen deaths and is believed to be the largest outbreak of its kind in fluid milk in the nation.
Initially, scientists and doctors feared pasteurization — a heating process that destroys dangerous pathogens in food and is often lauded as one of humanity’s greatest public health achievements — had somehow failed to kill the salmonella, as it typically would have.
But one detail was missing from Gubba Homestead’s video: A five-month investigation released by public health experts in September 1985 determined that tainted raw milk had likely entered the piping system and blended with the already pasteurized product, spurring the 1985 outbreak.
The case, and the subsequent findings, is included on the Food and Drug Administration’s webpage “Raw milk misconceptions and the danger of raw milk consumption.”
“The 2% pasteurized milk was likely contaminated by raw milk post-pasteurization. Both the FDA lab and a private lab confirmed that the outbreak strain of salmonella was heat sensitive and would not survive pasteurization,” the FDA site says. “Investigation at the implicated plant revealed a potential cross-connection between tanks that contained raw milk and pasteurized skim milk.”
When the Tribune asked Gubba Homestead why these findings weren’t included in the video, the influencer said in an email that she encourages “people to think critically, do their own research, and stop outsourcing their health to profit-driven industries and media outlets who’ve been caught countless times promoting harmful products and suppressing truth.”
“Let me be clear. Regarding my comments on pasteurized milk: They’re backed by decades of nutritional science, biochemical research and thousands of testimonies from people who’ve healed gut issues by ditching denatured, ultra-processed dairy,” the content creator added, though she did not cite any specific studies or reports.
Despite well-documented risks, raw milk appears to be gaining popularity in Illinois as well as across the country as social media personalities — and even some lawmakers and public health figures — embrace unpasteurized dairy.
Today, more dairy farms in Illinois offer raw milk for purchase compared with roughly a decade ago, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
On-farm sales of raw milk were legalized in Illinois, with some restrictions, in 2016. That year, two farms statewide had permits to sell raw milk, state health department records show. Now 18 farms across the state have permits to sell milk that hasn’t been pasteurized, which can only be sold on the farm where it was produced. It must undergo routine testing and include signage warning of the health risks.
Three new farms were approved to sell raw milk this year, the most recent one licensed last month, according to the state health department statistics as of the end of July.
One Illinois farmer who sells raw milk says demand for the product has skyrocketed in the past five years or so.
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Pedro Martinez, from left, Darrin Stoller, 11, and his uncle co-owner Paul Kilgus talk while milking cows at Kilgus Farmstead on July 31, 2025, in Fairbury. Kilgus Farmstead is one of 18 farms permitted to sell raw milk in Illinois, but it can only be sold on the farm where it was produced. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
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Pedro Martinez, from left, Darrin Stoller, 11, and his uncle co-owner Paul Kilgus talk while milking cows at Kilgus Farmstead on July 31, 2025, in Fairbury. Kilgus Farmstead is one of 18 farms permitted to sell raw milk in Illinois, but it can only be sold on the farm where it was produced. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Kilgus Farmstead in Fairbury, roughly 115 miles south of downtown Chicago, sold about 50 gallons of raw milk a week when it began offering it in 2020. Now sales are at about 800 to 1,000 gallons weekly, said Matt Kilgus, a partner in the family business.
“It’s really increased pretty significantly,” added Kilgus, though he noted that roughly 90% of the farm’s total milk sales still come from Grade A pasteurized milk, which the farm processes on-site. “We get people from as far as Chicago coming for raw milk.”
Kilgus added that he believes improvements over the last few decades in dairy farming standards and equipment have resulted in a safer product, for both raw and pasteurized milk.
While Illinois has experienced no outbreaks related to raw milk farms since 2017, state health officials warned that “raw milk always carries the risk of transmitting diseases; only pasteurization can guarantee that no disease-causing organisms remain.”
Janet McGraw of Elgin, whose four children were sickened by salmonella during the 1985 outbreak, called the burgeoning raw milk fad “ridiculous.”
While she appreciates certain wellness trends like taking a more critical look at various additives and dyes used in the modern diet, she urges the public to use some “common sense.”
“I think there’s a line,” she added. “Knowingly consuming something you don’t necessarily know is safe, like raw milk, that’s stupid. … I certainly would not do it.”
Cases of foodborne illnesses across the country continue to be connected to raw milk consumption.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture in June urged the public to discard one brand of raw milk after samples were confirmed to be contaminated with campylobacter and patients reported symptoms of campylobacteriosis after consuming the product. The department on Aug. 18 warned consumers that listeria was detected in samples from another brand.
A July Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report linked raw milk at a California dairy farm to roughly 170 salmonella infections from September 2023 to March 2024. According to the study, 120 of the patients were children and 18 had to be hospitalized.
Earlier this month, the Florida Department of Health identified raw milk from one farm as the source that sickened at least 21 people with E. coli or campylobacter since January. Six children were infected and seven patients were hospitalized, with at least two developing severe complications.
One woman filed a lawsuit against the Florida dairy on Aug. 13, claiming she miscarried after becoming ill while caring for her toddler who grew sick after drinking the unpasteurized milk. The dairy did not return Tribune requests for comment.
On Aug. 12, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo posted links to state health department warnings about raw milk on the social media site X, while at the same time declaring that “Floridians have the freedom to make informed health choices.”
“I support the decision to consume raw milk when sought for potential health benefits and protective factors,” he added. “Be aware of your source and know the risks.”
‘Terrifying’
At the age of 10, Sara Sisenwein had a glass of milk with dinner in early April 1985. Soon after, she became violently ill, suffering from severe vomiting and diarrhea, later followed by rectal bleeding.
“It was the worst thing ever,” said Sisenwein, who lived in Wilmette at the time and now resides in Colorado.
She recalled getting a shot of penicillin, but symptoms still worsened afterward. Sisenwein was admitted to a local hospital and treated for a strain of antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had sickened many locally as well as in other Midwest states.
“I remember that floor in the hospital changed from whatever it was used before to a floor exclusively for salmonella patients,” she said. “I remember watching TV in the hospital. A week in, they were reporting on the outbreak on the news.”
Then broadcasts started covering deaths connected to the outbreak, which began in late March 1985 and was attributed to contaminated milk processed at Hillfarm Dairy in Melrose Park, a Jewel Food Stores subsidiary.
“That’s when it started to freak me out,” she recalled. “The … rabbi came in and started praying for me.”
Even after Sisenwein was released from the hospital following about two weeks of treatment, she said she remained skinny and weak for months.
McGraw’s four children were also sickened at the time and two of them were hospitalized at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital.
“There were several people coming in with the same symptoms and it was like ‘what’s going on?’” she said. “Over the next few days, that number got larger and larger. … There were also babies that were drinking milk from bottles. Young, young babies that were being brought in. How terrifying is that?”
Jerry Kozak, then chief of the FDA’s milk safety branch, traveled to Illinois to head a lengthy investigation of the outbreak. He recalled that then-President Ronald Reagan, a staunch Republican, prioritized federal time and resources for the review “because he was worried about the health of the country.”
A test-run of the plant, which was then considered a state-of-the-art dairy processing facility, revealed the likely cause: Kozak said tanks on the pasteurized side of the plant were filled with water while beet juice, a common food coloring, was poured in tanks on the raw milk side.
“The raw milk tanks began leaking between what we call a cross-connection between raw and pasteurized milk,” he said. “Low and behold, we started to see that red dye being introduced in the pasteurized … side. The clear water began getting contaminated, if you will, by what would have been raw milk.”
The case ignited a class action lawsuit against Jewel Food Stores, though a jury in 1987 cleared the company of charges that it had acted recklessly and punitive damages weren’t awarded to the victims. But the outbreak launched a review of dairy plants across the country, with new safeguards implemented to prevent raw and pasteurized milk from mixing, Kozak recalled.
“It did eventually serve to prevent it from happening in the future,” added Kozak, 75, who later served as CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation until 2014.
More states allow raw milk sales
Kozak says it’s hard for him to witness the nation’s current debate on raw milk, especially when some prominent voices in government encourage its consumption.
“What I fear for are the people who are going to get sick because of that misinformation,” he said.
President Donald Trump’s U.S. surgeon general nominee Dr. Casey Means, whose medical license is inactive, has said, “when it comes to a question like raw milk, I want to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm.”
Kennedy, who advises the president on health and welfare matters, has said he only drinks raw milk. His wife, actress Cheryl Hines, recently said that she’d drink raw milk while expressing support for Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
“Something like that doesn’t worry or scare me,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “I feel very connected to MAHA.”
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, recently posted on X that “… good natural food like raw milk makes you well and healthy and you won’t need Big Pharma.”
Since 1987, the FDA has required pasteurization of all milk for interstate commerce. But individual states can still regulate the sale within their borders.
About 20 states allow some form of farm-to-consumer sales of unpasteurized milk and a dozen permit retail store sales, according to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
Over the past decade or so “in general, I will say we have seen more states passing regulation that allows for the sales of raw milk,” said Alexia Kulwiec, the organization’s executive director. “Part of it is, I think there’s just a movement toward healthy, natural — a return to food as it used to be.”
Earlier this month, two Republican Ohio lawmakers introduced a bill to legalize the sale of raw milk directly to consumers. A North Dakota law allowing direct-to-consumer sales of unpasteurized milk took effect Aug. 1.
“We’ve been working on this for 25 years, little by little, getting states to liberalize their laws,” said Sally Fallon Morell, president of the pro-raw milk Weston A. Price Foundation in Washington, D.C. “I would like to see raw milk sold in retail stores in every state. I predict that within 20 years, we will see that.”
The Chicago-based American Medical Association and Schaumburg-based American Veterinary Medical Association state that all milk sold for human consumption should be pasteurized. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is based in Itasca, cautions that raw milk can pose serious health risks, particularly to children.
John Lucey, director of the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said there’s no convincing evidence that raw milk offers tangible nutritional or health benefits when compared with the pasteurized product. But even with the best dairy practices and sampling of milk, the risk of illness is far greater, he said.
“A high percentage of the people who get sick are children,” he said. “That’s the thing that really disappoints me. And scares me.”
Dr. David Nguyen, an infectious disease physician at Rush University Medical Center, said he’s sympathetic to worries that there’s too much processing of food products.
“But this is not one of them. This is simply heating milk to kill off bacteria. There’s nothing chemical done to it. This is a very safe procedure and it’s very beneficial,” he said. “I can imagine some people have concerns about modern life. About chemicals. About treating everything industrially. And those I think are legitimate concerns. But … this is one aspect that clearly improves public safety.”
