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% — only the second increase since the 1970s — while consumption of plant milk fell 5.9%, according to data from Circana, a market research firm. Sales of dairy milk overall were up 1.9%, and sales of raw milk spiked by 17.6%.

“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 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.

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”; cosmetics mogul Hailey Baldwin Bieber pour it over her body in ads for Glazing Milk, her blockbuster moisturizer; and 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.

“People were so curious,” said 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% 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 can contain probiotic bacteria, but it can also carry 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.