On Top Of Everything Else, Now I Have To Worry About My Kid's Milk?

Every evening at about 6:30 p.m., I pour my toddler a sippy cup of cold milk and we curl up on the couch next to my husband. “Mama sit!” he says, his way of asking to sit on my lap as he enjoys his milk and a movie of his choosing. It’s a joyful moment of family time, a carefree and cozy break at the end of our busy days.

When I learned that the Food and Drug Administration paused its quality testing on milk, my mind immediately went to our sweet family ritual. It rocked me. The testing pause comes after we learned that bird flu is spreading in dairy cows, traces of the killed virus in our commercial milk supply, which was another development that caused a spike in my anxiety and a late-night message to our pediatrician. I wondered what exactly this pause in testing meant, in the literal sense, and how long it would go on. I worried I would now spend that precious family time concerned about what was in my kid’s milk.

This particular threat is just one of many. From increasing grocery prices, shuttering Head Start programs, abortion bans that make pregnancy more dangerous, bringing back measles, not to mention the threat of gun violence in schools — there are many large ways that the Trump administration has made parents’ lives more difficult — and comparatively, concern over a sippy cup of milk might seem small.

But that smallness is part of what makes this new concern feel so particularly insidious.

Milk is a drink that, for many children, becomes an extension of the comforting bond they formed with their parent through breast- or bottle-feeding, a bridge from baby- to toddlerhood. I relish my son’s faint, milky breath before bedtime, and when I read about the FDA pause, my initial panic came in part from the fear that this tether to his early moments would be severed too soon.

These seemingly small issues like the milk testing are the ones that make the everyday lived experience of parenting feel less safe — and less joyful. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

Brittney Pagone, a former nurse and current stay-at-home mom who runs the Instagram page PAMoms4Change, felt a similar panic. The news alarmed her so much, she says, that she no longer plans to wean her nearly 1-year-old daughter, opting to breastfeed for longer rather than switching to whole milk. This is a privilege, she knows; she has both the time and the ability to breastfeed her daughter, two things many moms don’t have.

The confusion Pagone felt with this news, she says, is just another part of parenting under the current Trump administration, which is currently brewing plans to boost the national birth rate. Pagone finds the administration’s push for families to have more children, at the same time eliminating the safety nets that make it feasible, utterly infuriating.

The decision to breastfeed longer than she’d planned isn’t the only one Pagone has felt forced into because of the Trump administration. Her family recently took a vacation that was close enough to Texas that she requested her infant be vaccinated for measles early.

Meanwhile, the president, who has contemplated giving people $5,000 per child to encourage larger families, has taken to billing himself as the “fertilization president.” And as we struggle to navigate what feels like an increasingly dangerous environment for our children, the government goads us to have more.

“You don’t want to think about going to buy your fire extinguisher when there’s a fire in your kitchen. You want it there already.”

Nicole Whitcraft is a clinical research data coordinator and mother of one, and she is extremely concerned that these government cuts indicate that the Trump administration isn’t prioritizing children’s safety. “It’s just another instance of this administration putting [its] agenda ahead of public safety.”

The FDA’s pause comes on the heels of more than 20,000 layoffs in the Department of Health and Human Services, in which the FDA’s workforce was affected, according to Reuters. In a statement, a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human services said the suspension of its “proficiency testing program” is temporary and it will resume once the effort is transferred to a new laboratory.

The pause only affects one of many layers of quality control — our milk supply is still being tested by manufacturers and at both state and federal levels, and experts say there’s no need to ditch your kid’s daily milk.

Jonathan Allen, Ph.D., professor and director of graduate programs for food science at North Carolina State University, says the testing that’s being paused is akin to a federal watchdog — the people involved in the day-to-day testing of our milk supply (of which, he says, there are many) are still performing their jobs. The only thing that won’t happen is the federal control program that makes sure the labs that do that daily testing are meeting the same standards. The paused program, Allen says, is often responsible for accreditation of state-level labs.

“If you’re using pasteurized milk, it’s going to be as safe as it’s always been,” Allen says, adding that states that allow raw milk sales might have more concern.

And for parents who typically buy pasteurized milk who are still worried, Allen says options like ultra-pasteurized milk or shelf-stable ultra-high temperature, or UHT, milk provide extra layers of protection.

Though she’s not immediately worried about the safety of milk we buy at the grocery store, Barbara Kowalcyk, Ph.D., M.A., associate professor and director of Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at The George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, says a lapse in part of our dairy testing is a concern, particularly as avian flu spreads among cattle.

“You don’t want to think about going to buy your fire extinguisher when there’s a fire in your kitchen,” she says, referencing our preparedness to detect and respond to a crisis should one arise. “You want it there already.”

“Children are one of our most vulnerable populations. They are at the highest risk of foodborne disease. No child should die from what they eat.”

Kowalcyk also raised red flags about the potential for contamination in the milk supply — one of the very reasons the FDA was created. In her book, The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, author Deborah Blum writes that many foods, especially milk, were adulterated prior to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Dairy farmers, she writes, would add plaster or chalk to make their milk whiter, sometimes topping it off with pureed calf brain to get a more creamy effect. Worse, some would add formaldehyde to their milk to make it last longer, which was directly linked to the deaths of children. They called it “embalmed milk.”

While formaldehyde may not be the issue today, Kowalcyk says adulteration could still be dangerous if some type of allergen were introduced. This is one of many high-level concerns Kowalcyk lists off about the FDA cuts overall (though she says she personally wouldn’t stop buying milk because of it). But Kowalcyk is also a mom, and that’s the reason she does this work in the first place.

In 2001, Kowalcyk’s 2-year-old son died from a complication of an E. coli infection, which he may have contracted from contaminated beef. Kowalcyk, already a scientist, then dedicated her life to food safety.

“Children are one of our most vulnerable populations. They are at the highest risk of foodborne disease,” she says. “No child should die from what they eat.”

Still, about 900 people die each year as a result of foodborne illnesses, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The Government Office of Accountability notes that this number is significantly deflated from the 2011 estimate of about 3,000 annual foodborne illness-related deaths because the more recent estimate looks at fewer illness-causing pathogens.

“Part of the role of the government is to provide protection for its population, right? That’s a core function of the FDA in my opinion,” Kowalcyk continues. “I work at the intersection of science and public policies because I want the agencies to do their job better; I want the industry to do better.”

Becoming a parent familiarized me with so many previously unknown risks: the sheer amount of innocuous items in our home that were now choking hazards, or the first moments driving with my son in the car, on roads that suddenly seemed more dangerous than they did just days before he was born. These simple, everyday things took on new meaning to me as a mother — I suspect I’m not alone in this.

Instead of setting up safety nets that would make parenting easier, or providing the kind of support that would actually encourage people to expand their families, the government is encroaching on our small joys and our sense of safety. When my son inevitably asks for more milk during our evening ritual, I shouldn’t have to worry about whether government cuts have made his request dangerous, I should only be concerned whether he’ll tolerate me moving him off my lap for long enough to grab it.

Brittney McNamara is an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Center grantee who has been reporting on health and identity since 2014. Currently the features director at Teen Vogue, Brittney writes and edits stories that impact teens and young adults — from the rise of GLP-1 use among kids to the ways abortion bans make teens' lives particularly tough. Learn more about Brittney's work and how to follow her here.