Ruin Their Crops on the Ground

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.