My wife and I have been drinking raw milk for nearly 20 years. Over that period, two different local dairy farmers have used Virginia’s “herd share” rule to legally provide raw milk to customers like us, who pay to own a portion of the cow rather than buying it through a typical retail channel. For the past 15 years, our milk has come from a diversified local farm that also produces eggs, chickens, turkeys, and beef, all raised on the rolling pastures of Russell County, Virginia. We know the farmer and his family well and have visited the farm several times over the years.

This raw milk has never made us ill, nor has it sickened the scores of family and friends who have stayed with us over that time and had this milk on their cereal, in their coffee, or straight up.

Maybe we’re just lucky. After all, studies have shown that raw milk and products made from it are more likely to cause food-borne illness than pasteurized milk. For the most part, I accept those studies, so I guess you can say we also accept a higher level of risk in order to drink a richer, better tasting and, we believe, nutritionally superior product, supplied by a neighboring farmer.

I mention raw milk not to debate its merits but as a window into MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement. The question is how liberals handed the Right a part of our base—historically left-leaning, countercultural people seeking to live, eat, and be healthier, many of whom also supported sustainable farming and organic foods. Annie Levin covered this shift well in her February, 2026 piece in The Nation, delineating a number of the cultural and political reasons behind it.

But one important reason is missing from that account: Many Americans simply want more control over their own lives and more autonomy in how they make decisions, especially regarding what and how we eat. This is particularly true in rural areas, where we tend to lean more libertarian. Much of the liberal establishment, on the other hand, admonishes us to “listen to the experts,” marginalizing or dismissing challenges to the prevailing wisdom. That’s a surefire way to piss us off in the countryside.

One example of this comes from an April, 2025 edition of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Discussing MAHA and the relatively new phenomenon of “crunchy conservatives,” the two experts on the program cast a wide net in their characterizations of misinformation. One of them, Dr. Andrea Love, categorically rejects the health value of organic food and the ecological benefits of organic farming, while extolling the safety of genetic modification. Dr. Love, whose PhD is in microbiology and immunology, rather than nutrition, agriculture or ecology, nevertheless regularly weighs into the debate about farming and health, including in a 2024 article she authored titled, “The organic food industry is a $180 billion marketing fraud.” Rejecting concerns about toxins in our food supply or claims that some farming practices lead to more nutritious foods, she instead argues that we should focus our health priorities on more frequent check-ups with the doctor, getting our vaccines and putting on sunscreen.

Journalist and podcaster Derek Beres, the other expert on the NPR program, places “regenerative agriculture” conferences alongside anti-vax gatherings as examples of “fringe groups” that have unfortunately gained a foothold in certain circles.

How did regenerative farming, documented in multiple studies to restore the health and productivity of damaged landscapes, offset carbon emissions while maintaining yields, and increase farmers’ profitability through reduced dependence on purchased inputs come to be a “fringe” phenomenon? Does that fringe element include the scores of agronomists, soil scientists, and other researchers from land-grant universities who present their findings at such gatherings?

If organic food is a $180 billion fraud, what should we make of studies showing higher levels of vitamins, nutrients, and phytochemicals resulting from sustainable soil-building practices, the heart of organic farming? Or of a UC Berkeley study showing that a switch to a diet of organic foods dramatically reduced pesticide residues in the blood stream of children and adults?

Understanding the emergence of MAHA as nothing more than an embrace of conspiracies that has distracted us from the “proven” practices of doctor’s visits, vaccines, and sunscreen fundamentally misses the point. People are questioning, even rejecting the advice of health and medical experts at least in part because they want more agency and more control over the decisions impacting their health. Rural folks in particular don’t take kindly to just-listen-to-the-experts admonishments—especially when some of these experts dismiss things they know to be true, like better farming practices leading to healthier foods. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that more regular visits to your doctor—if you have one anywhere near you—will not reverse the sorry state of American health.