Politicians sometimes do silly things to draw attention to their favorite issues. In 2015, then-Senator Jim Inhofe famously brought a snowball onto the floor of Congress to argue against the existence of climate change. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene toted a balloon to the 2023 State of the Union to mock the Biden administration’s handling of a Chinese spy craft. But in terms of sheer spectacle, few can top Jared Polis and his “forbidden” feast.

In 2015, Polis, then a Democratic congressman from Colorado, dined on hemp scones and washed them down with a glass of raw milk. The point was to highlight the purported absurdity of the government’s rules for what people can and cannot eat. He was pushing Congress to pass the Milk Freedom Act, a bill that aimed to make unpasteurized dairy easier for Americans to buy. At the time, the beverage was a delicacy for hippies in cities like Boulder, not a rallying cry for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. In May, the health secretary, who has said he drinks only raw milk, downed a shot of the stuff during a podcast taping in the White House.

Polis, now the governor of Colorado, still speaks fondly of his stunt. “Raw milk is relatively low-risk compared to many things that people choose to do in their everyday lives,” he told me recently.