andrea freeman
Author of
Ruin Their Crops on the Ground (Metropolitan, 2024)
Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press, 2019)
Andrea Freeman is a Professor at Southwestern Law School, 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, Washington Post, the New Yorker, USA Today, CBS News, The Root, PBS NewsHour, Yahoo! News, the Associated Press and more have featured her work.
Andrea’s Faculty Page / Represented by Ayesha Pande
BOOKS BY ANDREA
Ruin Their Crops on the Ground (Metropolitan, 2024)
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.
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.