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Camel Milk is a Thing and Costs $18 a Bottle

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Good news for all you people out there with dreams of traversing the Sahara in a pre-modern caravan—now you can live out at least part of the fantasy by drinking camel milk.

The California-based distributor Desert Farms sells camel milk directly and in more than 40 Whole Foods stores in California, reports The Wall Street Journal, with more locations to come. Desert Farms sources camel milk from a variety of camel ranches (yes, they exist) around the country.

Part of the reason you haven’t seen a lot of camel milk for sale in the U.S. is that as recently as 2009 it was banned by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Desert Farms, camel milk is 50% lower in fat and saturated fat than cows milk and is “easy to digest.”

One thing camel milk ain’t is cheap, at $18 a bottle. And why is it so expensive, you ask? “Camels don’t give lots of milk, but what they do give is precious,” Desert Farms says in the first sentence of its website’s FAQ section.

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