Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch

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

In 1789, to subjugate Indigenous tribes, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops on the ground and prevent them planting more.” Destroying the sources of food is just one way that the United States has used nourishment as a political tool. To prevent enslaved people from or escaping or rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only the least desirable and nutritious foods. 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 fifteen years of research to argue that American food law and policy have historically been used to create and maintain racial and cultural inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term 'food oppression,' moves from missions to Americanize immigrant food culture to the commodities supplied to Native reservations to USDA nutrition programs to milk as symbol of white nationalism. She traces the long-standing alliances between Washington and the food and agricultural industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities. And she shows how these practices continue to this day, in the form of marketing for unhealthy subsidized goods that target communities of color, causing diabetes, high blood pressure and even premature death.

Marrying Michael Pollan’s insights into food psychology with Michelle Alexander’s new understanding of race in the United States, 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.