No beverage conjures up the ideal of wholesome, corn-fed Americana like a tall, cold glass of milk. You could even call it the white picket fence of the dinner table.
Yet, despite its cozy connotations, Americans’ milk drinking has been on the decline for decades. Between 1975 and 2024, the country’s per capita milk consumption dropped by 47%, according to USDA data. It’s the kind of dragged-out downslide that suggests more than just a slump, but the steady drift toward cultural obsolescence.
But the tides may be shifting. Suddenly, milk’s half-century-long flop era is showing signs of reversal.
Last year, Americans consumed1.9% more cow’s milk than they did in 2023, with US dairy producers selling a hardy 40m additional gallons to domestic drinkers. It was the beverage’s first year-over-year sales increase since 2009 — and only the second since the 1970s.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
The trends within the trend make an even more convincing case for a comeback, with lactose-free and whole milk consumption up by a respective 12.3% and 3.6%, and a whopping 17.6% surge in the sale of raw milk. Meanwhile, 2024 plant-milk sales showed a 5.4% drop.
Most striking is that milk’s return to favor isn’t being led by kids and their well-meaning parents. It’s driven by fully-grown adults wanting the creamy stuff for themselves.
How is it possible that a long-declining children’s drink has caught on with a mature crowd? The rise of milk perfectly encapsulates how dietary trends and political currents have worked alongside economic forces to inform the way Americans live and eat.
It’s also a testament to Big Dairy’s relentless crusade to get you to drink more milk.
The government-backed rise of milk in America
Rural Americans have raised cows for meat and milk since the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that dairy milk became a nutritional staple across the country.
Widespread pasteurization made the beverage more easily transportable and far safer to drink. Around the same time, a crop of influential food chemists introduced the concept of vitamins and minerals to the general public, and loudly pitched daily milk drinking as a low-cost life hack for better health and vigor.
But the reason why milk became a staple of the American diet was because politicians, farmers, and the dairy industry were quick to jump on board.
From the late 1930s until 2014, the federal government implemented a series of price supports to stabilize farm income that wound up driving overproduction.
Though these supports were dramatically overhauled just over a decade ago, they helped cement a norm in which high output from cows guaranteed low costs for the dairy processors buying their milk. In recent decades the US has also expanded its milk export market, relying on overproduction to maintain globally competitive pricing.
The dairy industry has lobbied to maintain supportive policies, despite downsides to the environment, the welfare of dairy cows, and even farmers’ profits. From 2003 to 2023, according to the Guardian, milk production rose40% and exports increased 8x, with the average US farmer turning an annual profit just twice.
The consistent overproduction of milk is the reason federal dietary guidelines recommend that adults consume three cups of dairy per day, as well as why half-pint milk cartons are a mainstay of the nation’s school cafeterias. It also explains the fact that milk production kept going up, year after year, while Americans’ milk-drinking habits went down, and why the dairy industry has bent over backwards to market its products.
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Early efforts to promote milk, like many 1900s social initiatives, contained not-so-subtle eugenist — and white-supremecist — undertones.
“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,” said then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in a 1923 address to the World Dairy Congress.
Thankfully, the tenor of pro-milk messaging has changed. But its sense of urgency to sweet-talk the public into drinking more milk — and correct the supply-demand imbalance — have produced some truly memorable ads.
A 1950s TV commercial for the American Dairy Association that aired during The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet featured the show’s characters imploring their audience to “join us in a glass now.”
Millennials and younger Gen Xers would be remiss to forget the popular ‘Got Milk?’ campaign of the 1990s and 2000s, which reimagined the era’s swoon-worthiest stars from Naomi Campbell to Britney Spears as milk-mustachioed centerfolds.
Milk ads featuring Tyra Banks, Hanson, and Britney Spears. (National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board via eBay)
To whatever extent the propaganda ever truly took hold, milk wove its way into the backdrop of American life.
Looking back on my ’90s childhood in the dairy-farming state of Wisconsin, I can’t remember a single meal that didn’t include a glass (or several) of milk.
Where other kids needed to be coaxed into swapping out their Kool-Aid for dairy, I couldn’t get enough of that sweet alabaster elixir. I drank so much milk that my parents tried giving me a daily three-pint quota; after that plan failed, they joked about getting a cow.
How choice destroyed the milk industry
But milk’s bursts in popularity have been conspicuously conditional, ebbing and flowing with the economy and government support.
U.S. milk consumption reached an all-time high in 1945, at two cups per person per day, when wartime rationing limited access to meat, butter, and sugar but not — you guessed it — milk.
Before last year, its most recent popularity uptick coincided with the Great Recession, when crisis-level milk surpluses made the nutrition-dense beverage extra cheap at the same time that American consumers were especially short on cash.
Then came the 2010s, which saw the sharpest decline in U.S. per capita milk consumption since the 1970s. Americans went from drinking an average of 0.62 cups of milk each day in 2010 to 0.49 in 2019.
What happened to override a century’s worth of milk evangelism? The short answer is: choice. The proliferation of non-dairy milk alternatives gave more Americans better access to other options.
A Miami Beach, Florida, supermarket stocked with milk alternatives. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The longer answer is that overlapping cultural forces nudged consumers away from dairy and toward those plant-based alternatives.
The nation’s demographic makeup was changing, with a larger share of the population originating from non-milk-drinking cultures; while most people with northern European ancestry have a gene that preserves their ability to digest milk into adulthood, a majority of the global population is lactose intolerant.
At the same time, there was mounting concern over the environmental and health implications of consuming animal products, and growing suspicion of big agriculture and the global food industry.
Milk, in particular, saw increased pushback over the dairy industry’s insistence that the beverage is a dietary must-have. While nobody could refute milk’s nutritional value, scientists and nutrition professionals increasingly argued that there were plenty of other ways that people could incorporate the same nutrients into their diets.
So why, after all that, have Americans suddenly decided milk is back in?
Milk’s protein-powered comeback
As milk consumption picks up, some food-market analysts and dairy-industry insiders point to our seemingly insatiable appetite for protein as the primary answer.
“Consumers are seeking easy ways to boost their protein intake, and an 8-ounce serving of milk contains 8 grams of high-quality protein,” says Rachel Kyllo, Chief Marketing Officer for Dairy Farms of America Dairy Brands.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Reilly Newman, a brand strategist who works with food-industry clients, notes that the protein boom is itself a culmination of diet trends that endorse a more meat- and dairy-forward lifestyle.
“You’ve seen these big movements like the paleo diet and the keto diet, where more people have been exposed to drinking things like raw milk or whole milk or even real butter and they’ve become more accustomed to it. So now, even if they’re no longer following those special diets, things like whole milk and butter are still a part of their lives,” Newman says.
Lurking behind these trends lies a cadre of influential hucksters imploring the public to “do their own research” and go against the grain of science-backed health expertise. Perhaps no other consumer trend speaks to these anti-establishmentarian undercurrents like the rise of raw, or unpasteurized, milk.
The beverage, which saw the highest overall sales growth of any milk category last year, has had its own particularly high-profile moment in the sun thanks in part to celebrity backers such as the “tradwife” Ballerina Farm founder Hannah Neeleman and, of course, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
They’re part of a growing chorus of enthusiasts who tout raw milk’s purported health benefits despite — or, more likely, because of — its defiance of both federal food-safety regulations and over 100 years of scientific evidence.
As the writer Suzy Weissput it in a 2023 article for The Free Press, “To drink (and especially to produce) raw milk is a way of breaking with convention and raging against the machine — the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, doctors, PhDs, state regulators, and Big Dairy.”
And that’s to say nothing of the movement’s implicit (and explicit) white-supremacist nostalgia, a grim nod to the dairy industry’s less-than-spotless past.
Raw milk sales surged nearly 18% in 2024, although California’s Raw Farm recalled a batch of its top raw milk after a bird flu sample. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Of course, food trends come and go. Although Big Dairy may be relishing in milk’s newfound fandom, the industry hasn’t given up on its century-long PR crusade.
Recently, that’s meant enlisting a slew of TikTok creators to pass along the pro-milk mantle to a new generation of consumers that grew up in the age of almond milk, quietly advancing a more inclusive ideal of the modern milk drinker.
One standout post, paid for by the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP) features the popular Gen Z dance vlogger Nicole Laeno cheesing behind a lineup of plain and flavored milks while a catchy, cheer-like jingle sings, “O.G. superfood / Gotta drink some milk my dude / Milk hydrates better than wa-ter!”
If this round of messaging is the one that finally sticks, it’ll be a victory for Big Dairy that’s been generations in the making.
