The past few years have violated many of my assumptions about human progress. Twenty-year-olds are going MAGA. More and more Americans say that women should return to their “traditional” roles in society. For some reason, we have decided to gamble with bringing back once-eradicated deadly diseases.

And now, add to the list: Cow’s milk is back. Sort of.

Last year, US dairy producers sold about 0.8 percent more milk than in 2023, according to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics, the first year-over-year increase since 2009, when milk prices were historically low. That may not sound like much, but it’s a big deal for the dairy industry, which has seen a sustained drop in both per capita and total US milk consumption over the last few decades. Raw milk, which has not been pasteurized to kill pathogens, has seen double-digit growth, a concerning trend given its potential to spread life-threatening infections, though it still makes up a very small share of overall milk sales.

Meanwhile, non-dairy milks — the kind made from soybeans, oats, almonds, and other plants — have stumbled, declining by about 5 percent in both dollar and unit sales over approximately the last year, according to data shared with Vox by NielsenIQ and data reported elsewhere from the market research firm Circana.

A small uptick in cow’s milk intake is, obviously, not tantamount to the calamities that have been unleashed over the last six weeks in American politics. But it does likely sprout, at least in part, from the same vibe shift that’s given us butter-churning, homestead-tending tradwives, an unscientific turn against plant-based foods, and a movement to destroy public trust in vaccines.

After achieving ubiquity in the 2010s and early 2020s, plant-based milks may have lost their cool, nonconformist quality — much like how, after more than a decade of liberal cultural supremacy, embracing authoritarian revanchism now feels like countercultural rebellion.

The problem is that cow’s milk is not, unfortunately, just a harmless dietary preference — it’s land-intensive, water-intensive, climate-warming, and incredibly cruel to cows. Dairy cows contribute more than 10 percent of US methane emissions, a super-potent greenhouse gas, and their land use, while not nearly as great as that of beef farming, is still high, occupying land that could otherwise be freed up for carbon-sequestering ecosystems. To mitigate climate change, our dairy consumption needs to go down, not up.

It’s too early to tell whether the growth in milk sales is a temporary blip or a genuine turning point; Dotsie Bausch, executive director of Switch4Good, a group that advocates for moving away from dairy consumption, told me she’s optimistic it’s the former. And all this comes amid another important shift: America’s top coffee chains, including Starbucks, Dunkin’, Dutch Bros, Tim Hortons, and Scooter’s — very large buyers of milk — have all in recent months dropped their extra charges for adding plant-based milks to drinks, a change that animal rights groups, led by Switch4Good, had demanded for years.........

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