andrea freeman

Author of
Ruin Their Crops on the Ground (Metropolitan, 2023)
Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press, 2019)

Andrea Freeman is a Professor at the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law, Fulbright Scholar, and pioneer of the theory of food oppression. She writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory, food policy, health, and consumer credit. NPR, Huffington Post, Salon, The Conversation, Whetstone, Pacific Standard, and more have featured her work.

Twitter / www.law.hawaii.edu/person/andrea-freeman

BOOKS BY ANDREA

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground (Metropolitan, 2023)

A comprehensive history of U.S. food law and policy as a means of dispossession and oppression, from colonialism to the present—from George Washington’s orders to destroy Indigenous crops and enslavers’ carefully calibrated rations to the USDA’s food distribution to Indigenous reservations and the poor state of public-school lunches, fueled by the alliances between the government and food industry.

Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press, 2019)

Skimmed tells the story of the first recorded identical Black quadruplets, born in 1946 to Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood and Pete Fultz, a tenant farmer in North Carolina. Annie Mae’s white doctor named the sisters after his relatives then auctioned off the rights to use them in marketing materials to the highest bidding formula company. The girls lived their entire lives in poverty, while Pet Milk’s profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. Jumping off from the Fultz sisters’ story, Skimmed analyzes why Black women in the U.S. have the lowest rates of breastfeeding. It explores how legal, political, and societal factors lead to ‘first food’ oppression.