Southwestern Law Review Presents: Food, Justice, & History

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History
Winner of the James Beard Media Award in Food Issues and Advocacy

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 is a national and international expert on the intersections between critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. She is a Fulbright scholar and the author of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan 2024), winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize in History and James Beard Award for Food Issues and Advocacy and Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press 2019), law review articles, book chapters and reviews, and op-eds. Skimmed is currently in development for a documentary with Topic Pictures. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Salon, Huffington Post, USA Today, Strict Scrutiny, The Root, Lit Hub, Yahoo! News, The Atlantic, NPR Shots Blog, Pacific Standard, The Conversation, Medium, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and National Library of Medicine, and she has appeared on ABC News, CBS News, PBS News Hour, The Takeaway, Here & Now, Food with Mark Bittman, Point of Origin, Newstalk Irish National Radio, Heritage Radio Network, The Electorette, Hawaii Public Radio.

At Southwestern Law School, Freeman teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Race, Culture, and Law. She received the Fulbright King’s College London U.S. Scholar Award for her research on food inequality in the United Kingdom. Freeman is also a founding member of the Academy of Food Law and Policy and has chaired sections of the Association of American Law Schools. 

Meet the panelists joining us for this engaging discussion on Professor Andrea Freeman's award-winning book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground.