Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch

The first and definitive history of the use of food in United States law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era

In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to ＂ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.＂ Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses.

From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that U.S. food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term ＂food oppression,＂ moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target marginalized communities, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death.

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates.

Andrea Freeman pioneered the field of food politics, which she teaches at the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law. She is also a Fulbright scholar and an expert in constitutional law, race and law, the federal courts, and comparative social justice. The author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Andrea has published and spoken widely on ＂food oppression,＂ a term that she coined, including in the Washington Post, Salon, NPR’s The Takeaway and Here & Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Black Agenda Report, and more. She lives in Honolulu.