Ruin Their Crops on the Ground

February 1, 2024

Law professor Freeman (Skimmed), one of the pioneers of the field of food politics, examines the historic and current ways food has been used as a weapon of conquest and control in the U.S., from George Washington ordering his troops to destroy Indigenous people's crops to the targeted marketing of unhealthy goods to communities of color. Prepub Alert.

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May 1, 2024
A critical assessment of food as a political weapon and source of ill health. A legal scholar of food, health, and race, Freeman, the author of Skimmed, chronicles the mobilization of food in the U.S. to control non-white populations, assimilate immigrants, boost corporate profitability by shaping cultural norms, and foster racial health disparities. She describes how the federal government used access to farmland and buffalo to displace Indigenous populations and diminish their numbers and how plantation owners deployed food to control the enslaved population. Food has also figured in immigrant assimilation and the privileging of whiteness. Mexicans, for example, were subject to homemaking assistance that privileged a European diet. Food-based assimilation occurs, as well, in school lunch programs that emphasize American fare such as hamburgers. Freeman focuses one chapter on milk, an unhealthy food for many non-Europeans. Race has also figured in food advertising--e.g., playing on stereotypes to sell pancakes and rice. Freeman blames the entanglement of the U.S. Department of Agriculture with giant agriculture and food production corporations for the unhealthy foods so dominant in schools and food assistance programs. Governmental subsidies to these corporations "make the unhealthiest food the cheapest," with processed foods a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. As reforms, Freeman calls for eliminating the work requirement in the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the major source of food assistance for low-income households, and for casting these problems as "vestiges of slavery" to be recognized under the 13th and 14th Amendments. This legal angle stems from her belief that "USDA food programs are unconstitutional because they perpetuate racial health disparities." The author is clearly well intentioned, but she dilutes her arguments with disparate examples and the broad scope of her assertions. A useful reminder that food can oppress, coerce, and undermine the bodies and aspirations of vulnerable minorities.

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May 1, 2024
A nation's food supply is central to its economy and very survival. Freeman (Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race and Injustice, 2021) takes a hard look at the history of America's agriculture and food distribution policies and finds them riddled with political corruption, inefficiency, racism, classism, and greed. European settlers arriving on the American continent upended traditional patterns of supply and demand. In 1789, George Washington himself ordered destruction of native food supplies with the words that give this book its title. Colonists moving westward introduced industrial agricultural methods, mindlessly destroying herds of buffalo that had sustained Native Americans for centuries and leading to a reliance on suboptimally nutritious foods. Emancipated enslaved Americans had sharecropping imposed on them, leaving them with little economic power to choose their diets. The rise of fast food and race-targeted advertising generated unhealthiness, especially among minority populations. Despite good intentions, free school lunches and other government subsidies have been distorted and subverted by politics. This American history, rife with predation and injustice, leaves readers with plenty of challenges for both present and future.

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Starred review from May 20, 2024
In a sweeping tour of American history, Freeman (Skimmed), a professor at Southwestern Law School, surveys food policy from the colonial era to today. She argues that present-day racial health disparities are undergirded by centuries of the government and elites prioritizing profit over the well-being of people of color. She begins with an account of early America, where European settlers routinely cut off Indigenous people from traditional food sources as a way to force them off their land and slave owners allowed enslaved people only meager rations. These policies engineered populations more prone to “nutrition related diseases,” Freeman writes, surfacing an abundance of fascinating examples, including how Indigenous youths forced into 20th-century residential schools suffered gastrointestinal ailments due to the unfamiliar diet imposed on them. Freeman draws eye-opening parallels to the present-day Department of Agriculture, which she characterizes as being under the thumb of a powerful agriculture lobby that, in order to off-load subsidized foods like potatoes, white rice, and milk in their cheapest to produce (and least nutritious) forms, has co-opted federal food-assistance programs to distribute low-quality foods to Indigenous, Black, and Latino families. Ripe with sharp analysis and fresh ideas, Freeman’s account concludes with a novel legal argument that the 13th Amendment and 14th Amendment could be used to challenge racial disparities caused by government food programs. Readers will relish this piquant new perspective on America’s political relationship with food.