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For such a ubiquitous beverage, milk is surprisingly controversial. In recent years, the drink—appetizingly defined by the FDA as the “lacteal secretion” of cows—has sparked heated disputes about its healthiness, its safety, and, with the proliferation of milk alternatives, what it even is. The ongoing outbreak of bird flu, which has spread to nearly 1,000 U.S. dairy herds and turned up in samples of unpasteurized milk, is but the latest flash point in the nation’s dairy drama, which has been ongoing for more than 150 years.

To Americans, milk has always been much more than a drink. It is a symbol of all that is pure and natural—of a simpler, pastoral time. In 1910, the writer Dallas Lore Shari rhapsodized in an Atlantic story about the scene that greeted him at his rural family farm after a day’s work in the dirty, lonely city. “Four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow,” he wrote. Milk was a respite from the coldness and isolation of the modern age. Newer conveniences such as canned condensed milk and milk delivery could save time and money, he acknowledged, but at a spiritual cost.

Nostalgia for the bygone era of family farms and rustic comforts mounted as milk production was revolutionized. In 1859, an unnamed writer lamented the erosion of old farming practices, in one of the earliest mentions of milk in The Atlantic. He commended a new book that criticized “the folly of the false system of economy which thinks it good farming to get the greatest quantity of milk with the least expenditure of fodder.” Others viewed the introduction of technology into dairying with suspicion. “I never see a milk-cart go by without a sense of vats and pipe-lines and pulleys and pandemonium, of everything that is gross and mechanical and utterly foreign to the fields,” one Atlantic writer complained in 1920. “It is no wonder that there is something wrong with their butter.”

In spite of the pushback, milk production continued to industrialize. It simply had to: As America’s growing population demanded more milk, a safe supply became harder to maintain. Milk, in its raw form—that is, straight from the cow—is prone to contamination with potentially deadly pathogens. Stringent regulation was a matter of public health, argued Hollis Godfrey, the former president of the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, in 1907. He claimed that, served raw, milk was responsible in some big cities for more than a quarter of deaths among children by age 5 (the drink was a major source of nutrition for young kids). Pasteurization, the process of heating milk to kill pathogens, was first introduced to major American dairies in the 1890s, to great effect. Between 1907 and 1923, New York City’s infant death rate decreased by more than 50 percent, in part a result of mandated milk pasteurization.

As milk grew safer and more accessible, it became a standard part of adult diets. Not everyone agreed that this was a good thing. Soldiers in World War I were furnished with cans of condensed milk—part of the “barbaric” and “uncivilized” meals they endured, one veteran wrote in the Atlantic in 1920. The drink became popular among women too, to the chagrin of the writer Don Cortes, who in 1957 complained in this magazine that the “trouble with the American woman is simply that she is brought up on milk.” The beverage made her so vigorous, so feisty, so “elongated” in height that she took to interests such as activism and lost all sense of femininity—or so his argument went.

All the while, skepticism about industrially produced milk remained. As I wrote earlier this year, critics of pasteurization in the early 1910s argued that it destroyed the nutritious properties and helpful bacteria in milk, a hugely oversimplified claim that raw-milk enthusiasts still make today. Some proposed experimentations with milk must have seemed shocking to the public, such as those described in a 1957 Atlantic report: “vaccinated” milk, which could contain antibodies produced by injecting cows’ udders with vaccines, or milk blended with juice, which would help children “drink their morning milk and fruit juice simultaneously.” With the advent of even newer innovations in milk in recent decades—strawberry-flavored, plant-based, and shelf-stable, to name a few—the drink’s natural connotations seem all but lost.

Milk has come a long way from the family farm; it is now mainly the purview of science and policy. Much of the pushback against innovation in milk today is not just about the milk itself but also about government overreach (indeed, milk-drinking is at its lowest point since the 1970s, but consumption of raw milk has spiked in the past year). Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most visible raw-milk enthusiast, has vowed to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of products including raw milk if he leads the Department of Health and Human Services. His vision to “Make America Healthy Again” has been embraced by some Americans who believe, just like the pasteurized-milk skeptics a century ago, that such a future represents not only better milk, but a better life.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted a 2022 petition by consumer advocacy groups to ban the use of the dye.

No drug is quite like nicotine. When it hits your bloodstream, you’re sent on a ride of double euphoria: an immediate jolt of adrenaline, like a strong cup of coffee injected directly into your brain, along with the calming effect of a beer. Nicotine is what gets people hooked on cigarettes, despite their health risks and putrid smell. It is, in essence, what cigarette companies are selling, and what they’ve always been selling. Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper.

But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be. Today, regulators at the FDA announced that they are pushing forward with a rule that would dramatically limit how much nicotine can go in a cigarette. The average cigarette nowadays is estimated to have roughly 17 milligrams of the drug. Under the new regulation, that would fall to less than one milligram. If enacted—still a big if—it would decimate the demand for cigarettes more effectively than any public-service announcement ever could.

The idea behind the proposal is to make cigarettes nonaddictive. One study found that some young people begin feeling the symptoms of nicotine addiction within a matter of days after starting to smoke. In 2022, roughly half of adult smokers tried to quit, but fewer than 10 percent were ultimately successful.

For that reason, the rule could permanently change smoking in America. The FDA insists that the proposal isn’t a ban per se. But in the rule’s intended effect, ban may indeed be an apt term. The FDA estimates that nearly 13 million people—more than 40 percent of current adult smokers—would quit smoking within one year of the rule taking effect. After all, why inhale cancerous fumes without even the promise of a buzz? By the end of the century, the FDA predicts, 4.3 million fewer people would die because of cigarettes. The agency’s move, therefore, should be wonderful news for just about everyone except tobacco executives. (Luis Pinto, a vice president at Reynolds American, which makes Camel and Newport cigarettes, told me in an email that the policy “would effectively eliminate legal cigarettes and fuel an already massive illicit nicotine market.”)

Still, there’s no telling whether the FDA’s idea will actually come to fruition. The regulation released today is just a proposal. For the next eight months, the public—including tobacco companies—will have the opportunity to comment on the proposal. Then the Trump administration can decide whether to finalize the regulation as is, make changes, or scrap it entirely. Donald Trump has not signaled what he will do, and his relationship to cigarettes is complicated. In 2017, his FDA commissioner put the idea of cutting the nicotine in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels on the agency’s agenda. But the tobacco industry has recently attempted to cozy up to the president-elect. A subsidiary of Reynolds donated $10 million to a super PAC backing Trump. Even if the Trump administration finalizes the rule, the FDA plans to give tobacco companies two years to comply, meaning that the earliest cigarettes would actually change would be fall 2027.

If Trump goes through with the rule, it may be the end of cigarettes. But although cigarettes might be inseparable from nicotine, nicotine is not inseparable from cigarettes. These days, people looking to consume the drug can pop a coffee-flavored Zyn in their upper lip or puff on a banana-ice-flavored e-cigarette. These products are generally safer than cigarettes because they do not burn tobacco, and it is tobacco smoke, not nicotine, that causes most of the harmful effects of cigarettes. FDA estimates that should cigarettes lose their nicotine, roughly half of current smokers would transition to other, safer products to get their fix, Brian King, the head of the FDA’s tobacco center, told me.

Whether nicotine’s staying power is a good thing is still unclear. Few people—even in the tobacco industry—will argue with a straight face that cigarettes are safe. Nicotine defenders, however, are far more common. In my time covering nicotine, I have spoken with plenty of people who emphatically believe that the drug helps them get through their day, and that their habit is no more shameful or harmful than an addiction to caffeine. There is clearly a market for these products. Just ask Philip Morris International, which earlier this year invested $600 million to build a new factory to meet surging demand for Zyn. But it’s true, too, that nicotine is addictive, regardless of how it’s consumed. There isn’t much data looking at long-term impacts of these new nicotine-delivery devices, but the effects of nicotine, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, are enough to give cardiologists pause.

I promised my parents—both smokers during my childhood—that I’d never pick up a cigarette. I kept that promise. But about a year ago, I started to wonder just how bad safer forms of nicotine could actually be. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.) I found myself experimenting with Zyn. Doing so gave me a window into why my parents craved cigarettes, but it also quickly gave me a firsthand look at why it was always so hard for them to quit. My one-Zyn-a-day habit quickly became two, and two became four. And yet, each time the pouch hit my lip, that burst of dopamine seemed to get more and more lackluster. Soon enough, I was reaching for nicotine without even thinking about it. The FDA’s new proposal, if finalized, will mean that misguided teens (or, in my case, 33-year-olds) prone to experimentation won’t do so with deadly cigarettes. But that will be far from the end of America’s relationship with nicotine.