In the past few weeks Ballerina Farm, aka Hannah Neeleman and ‘queen of the tradwives’, has come under fire on TikTok for selling raw milk, straight from her mountain valley farm in Utah.
Hannah, who has 10.5 million followers on the social media platform, is one of many who has made drinking unpasteurised milk en vogue.
For those unfamiliar, unpasteurised or raw milk is dairy that hasn’t been heat treated to kill pathogens and extend its shelf life.
But news outlet KPCW reported that the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, found two instances of too-high levels of coliform, the family of bacteria that includes E. coli, in the influencer’s bottled raw milk.
Hannah and her husband, Daniel, stopped selling raw dairy products from their Ballerina Farm Store in August 2025, and two weeks ago said they had never sold unsafe dairy, in a TikTok that hit 2.5 million views.
However, they did backtrack on an earlier statement where they’d claimed raw milk was ‘100% safe’, adding: ‘No one produces 100% safe all the time. That’s impossible.’
The raw milk boom
But Ballerina Farm isn’t solely responsible for the UK’s obsession with raw milk. The movement began to pick up after in the mid-2010s with sales of raw milk rising from 610,000 litres in 2014, to three million litres in 2018, according to Farmers’ Weekly.
This is despite it being illegal to sell unpasteurised dairy milk in supermarkets or high street shops in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which has been the case since 1985. Not to mention, it’s outlawed in Scotland.
But this isn’t stopping influencers from talking about what they believe to be ‘benefits’ of drinking raw milk, with more than 40,000 posts about it on TikTok alone.
Influencers liken it to breastmilk and claim it helps digestion, immunity, and that it’s anti-inflammatory, and people seem to be listening.
Google searches for raw milk have steadily increased since 2022, with a spike in search in 2025, and searches for ‘raw milk near me’ increasing by 40% in the UK in the same time frame.
Raw milk is a health hazard
The pasteurising process for dairy is ‘one of the simplest and most important food safety measures we have’ according to food safety expert, Sylvia Anderson.
‘Milk is typically pasteurised by heating it to around 72°C for at least 15 seconds and then rapidly cooling it, which destroys harmful bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and Campylobacter,’ Sylvia tells Metro.
‘These pathogens can naturally be present in raw milk and may cause serious illness, particularly in young children, pregnant women, older adults and those with weakened immune systems.
‘Raw milk skips this safety step, which is why it carries a greater risk.’
If you ingest E. coli you may experience relatively brief diarrhoea, although some strains can cause severe stomach cramps, bloody diarrhoea and vomiting, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Healthy adults typically recover within a week, but in more serious cases you can develop a life-threatening form of kidney failure.
Salmonella will display similar symptoms, along with a fever, nausea, chills,and headaches, as will listeria, while Campylobacter is a bacteria also responsible for diarrhoea.
After gradually increasing since 2022, E. coli infections rose from 2,018 in 2023 to 2,544 in 2024 in England, according to the UK Health Security Agency.
One large outbreak in 2024 saw 293 people being infected by E. coli, 126 people needing hospital care and two deaths.
‘From a food safety perspective, pasteurised milk is the safer option,’ Sylvia says. ‘Nutritionally, raw and pasteurised milk are very similar. Some supporters of raw milk believe it offers extra health benefits, often claiming that pasteurisation destroys nutrients or beneficial enzymes.
‘However, scientific evidence shows that pasteurised milk retains its key nutritional value, including protein, calcium and essential vitamins. Any nutritional differences between raw and pasteurised milk are very small and do not outweigh the potential food safety risks.’
Sylvia adds that raw milk cannot be sold in UK supermarkets for this reason, and must be sold directly from farmers to the consumers.
In the UK, raw milk cannot be sold in supermarkets because of these health risks. Its sale is tightly restricted and it can only be purchased directly from registered producers or through limited distribution channels, with clear health warnings for consumers.
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