Andrea Freeman, "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Andrea Freeman, “Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch”
Host: Kelly Spivey
Guest: Andrea Freeman
Original Air Date: October 17, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into Andrea Freeman’s groundbreaking book Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch. The purpose of this discussion is to illuminate how food systems in the United States—from colonization to modern school lunches—have been harnessed as tools of oppression, marginalization, and control, especially over Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities. Freeman, a legal scholar specializing in food law and critical race theory, articulates the intersections of historical policy, racial inequality, and law, tracing how food has been weaponized both for subjugation and resistance across American history.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

1. Andrea Freeman’s Journey to the Book

• Freeman’s Background (03:36–04:36):
  Explains her two-decade-long engagement with the topic, starting from a law school paper on “Fast Food Oppression Through Poor Nutrition,” evolving into scholarly work on food, race, and the law.

  “I have a long history. The material in this book I have been thinking about for 20 years." — Andrea Freeman [03:36]

• Evolving Lens (04:52–05:53):
  Discusses her shift from focusing on corporations and government collusion to examining the ongoing historicity of food as an instrument of colonialism, slavery, immigration restriction, and present-day policy.

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2. Food as a Tool of Control: Native and Indigenous Peoples

• Origin of Fry Bread (06:37–08:42):
  Fry bread’s invention comes from Indigenous ingenuity/survival under duress: flour and lard rations, sometimes infested, were distributed to incarcerated Indigenous groups; frying in lard masked poor quality.

  “Fry bread evolved into a wider culture, cultural tradition ... but it’s important to remember it’s not a traditional food. ... Outsiders will look at fry bread as a symbol of Indigenous people not taking care of their health … Any problems that they have ... are their own fault.” — Andrea Freeman [06:37]

• Title’s Origin and Policy of Starvation (09:15–10:15):
  Title of the book cites George Washington’s military order: “Ruin their crops on the ground … and prevent them planting more,” an explicit strategy to starve Native populations for land theft.

• Rations and Social Engineering (12:29–13:41):
  — Transition from destroying native foodways to using rations as levers for forced migration, boarding schools, and family structure manipulation.

• Commodity Food Boxes and "Nutritional Colonialism" (13:42–15:34):
  The 1930s "commodities" food boxes came from agricultural surplus: unhealthy, processed foods—corn syrup, soybean oil, canned meats, dehydrated milk.

  “When there is something that’s produce, it’s usually rotten by the time it reaches a reservation. So the diet that comes out of eating from these boxes, as you can imagine, is conducive to ... type 2 diabetes and other health issues.” — Andrea Freeman [13:42]

  • Dr. quoted comparing food aid to "smallpox infected blankets".
  • Indigenous activists label it “nutritional colonialism.”

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3. The Legacy of Slavery on Food Systems

• Slave Diets and Law (17:26–22:19):
  Slavers calculated minimum rations to enable labor, minimize resistance—not enough for thriving and sometimes intentionally malnutritive. Rations varied based on utility; the elderly and children got less.

  Laws restricted enslaved and free Blacks’ market participation and criminalized subsistence activities. Legal system justified deprivation via racist pseudoscience, not recognizing deliberate starvation.

  “The law was always the friend of the enslavers. ... The nutrition program—the diet—didn’t work out ... attributed to racial differences that didn’t exist." — Andrea Freeman [19:31]

• Emancipation’s Aftermath: Freedmen’s Bureau and Convict Leasing (24:41–30:00):
  After slavery, lack of support forced freed people back into labor contracts or convict leasing. Freedmen’s Bureau food aid was minimal and often functionally funneled Blacks into exploitative labor.

  Convict leasing post-emancipation became a new form of industrial enslavement—laws (vagrancy, idling) criminalized Black life, leading to prison labor under appalling conditions.

  “Some people have said it was even worse than being enslaved ... in convict leasing, there was no investment into the human being … people were just considered disposable.” — Andrea Freeman [27:34]

• The 13th Amendment and Modern Parallels (30:07–31:42):
  Points to enduring forms of systemic exploitation via the 13th Amendment loophole (forced labor as criminal sanction).
  Reference to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

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4. Resistance and Backlash: Black Panther Breakfasts & School Lunches

• Black Panther Free Breakfast Program (32:14–34:21):
  Panthers’ community-based feeding programs challenged state authority and stereotypes. The government responded with targeted misinformation, trying to discredit and shut down the programs.

  “This was very threatening to the government at that time because it was such a successful program ... It disrupted this common vision of ... angry black men with guns, because that is never what it was all about.” — Andrea Freeman [32:14]

  Government expansion of school meals traced to Panthers’ example—though less nutritious, less community-oriented.

• School Lunches: From Surplus Distribution to Fast Food (34:55–38:14):
  School lunch origins in New Deal surplus disposal; later, influx of highly processed foods and commercial fast food brands into underfunded schools, shaping children’s tastes and normalizing junk food.

  "We kind of like sold off our kids to make ... corporate deals and to help the government avoid properly funding the public schools.” — Andrea Freeman [36:58]

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5. Assimilation Policies and Americanization via Food

• Mexican-American Women & Schooling (38:14–43:08):
  Government-sponsored homemaking and assimilation programs targeted Mexican-American mothers and daughters, promoting “American” meals and family structures as tools of social control.

  School lunch became a vector for Americanization, with children preferring processed school food over traditional fare, creating rifts within families.

  “The way to control families is through ... the mother who’s the heart of the home and the children who are the future. ... If they can be trained out of eating what they’ve grown up with and into eating like an American, then that is the pathway to patriotism.” — Andrea Freeman [40:07]

• Pop Culture: “Fresh Off the Boat” and Lunchbox Moments (41:50–43:08):
  Social pressure compounds institutional policy—media depictions reinforce racist food norms and assimilationist messages.

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6. Branding, Stereotypes, and Racialized Food Policy

• Racist Food Branding (43:08–45:10):
  Retiring mascots like “Aunt Jemima” has symbolic value, but deeper policy changes are needed; such branding perpetuates myths that justify substandard food policy for minority groups.

  “Racist food branding ... tells us what certain people eat. ... It justifies policies that don’t support healthy and nutritious living for some populations because of these stereotypes.” — Andrea Freeman [43:32]

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7. The Politics of Milk, Marketing, and Policy

• History of Milk, “Pet Milk Quadruplets,” and Formula Promotion (45:10–48:30):
  Story of Black “Pet Milk Quadruplets” as a marketing tool for formula, and racialized narratives around milk consumption.

  “He decided to auction them off to formula companies to use them in their promotional materials. … They were the first black baby models for formula. And so black families use formula at much higher rates than white families.” — Andrea Freeman [46:36]

• Enzymes, Lactose, and White Supremacy (48:52–52:31):
  Milk was made into a symbol of “whiteness” and Aryan supremacy—despite deep histories of milk consumption among Africans. Today milk remains a coded marker of racial difference; white supremacists use the emoji as a symbol.

  “Aryans drink milk. They are ... the people of the strongest and the highest intellect. ... Now we’ve seen white nationalists taking a little ... glass of milk, putting [it] into their Twitter emoji, ... and this association between who are the people who can digest milk? White people, they must be superior.” — Andrea Freeman [51:29]

• USDA, DMI, and Corporate Influence (52:41–55:04):
  USDA’s Dairy Management Inc (DMI) promotes surplus milk by partnering with fast food chains: increasing dairy in products like cheese pizzas. Policies disproportionately impact populations reliant on fast/processed food.

  “DMI is the marketing branch of the USDA for dairy ... developing products—Domino’s seven cheese pizza, Taco Bell…—to try to increase the amount of cheese in their products.” — Andrea Freeman [52:41]

  Questions of legality and ethics arise — USDA’s dual mandates (agriculture vs. public health nutrition) represent a fundamental conflict.

  “That’s not just not illegal. That is their mandate. That is their job. ... The USDA has a double mandate: ... to assist the agricultural industries ... and ... to be nutrition. ... Those are in conflict.” — Andrea Freeman [55:04–56:36]

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8. Structure, Choice, and Agency

• The Myth of Individual Choice (56:36–59:50):
  Structural factors (poverty, access, time, transportation, corporate targeting) constrain food “choices,” but U.S. culture clings to notions of agency and personal responsibility, which companies exploit to resist regulation.

  “Choice is basically an illusion that we all need to live under just to keep our sanity. ... The reality is almost nobody’s choosing for themselves when it comes to what they eat.” — Andrea Freeman [57:19]

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9. Legal Remedies and Structural Reform

• What Can Be Done? (59:50–60:49):
  Freeman suggests the U.S. must disentangle food policy from corporate influence. Agencies regulating nutrition should be distinct from industry support bodies, with real science and public interest at the fore—though she notes this seems politically distant at present.

  “The first step, biggest solution, is to try to get corporations out of our food policy and just say that we're going to have separate agencies dealing with industry and dealing with nutrition and that we're actually going to be guided by science.” — Andrea Freeman [60:06]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the book’s throughline:

  “…food inequality’s roots as a tool that enslavers relied on to enforce their brutal regimes make it a vestige of enslavement which the 13th amendment forbids.” — Kelly Spivey quoting Freeman [05:53]

• On “nutritional colonialism”:

  “The term that I actually really latched onto … was nutritional colonialism, which I feel like you could write an entire book about.” — Kelly Spivey [15:34]

• On convict leasing:

  “… some people have said it was even worse than being enslaved because ... when it came to convict leasing, there was no investment into the human being … people were just considered very disposable.” — Andrea Freeman [27:34]

• On agency and food choices:

  “Choice is basically an illusion that we all need to live under just to keep our sanity. ... The reality is almost nobody’s choosing for themselves when it comes to what they eat.” — Andrea Freeman [57:19]

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Key Timestamps of Important Segments

• 03:36 – Freeman’s background and academic journey
• 06:37 – The origins and symbolism of fry bread
• 09:15 – George Washington’s policy and book title origin
• 13:42 – Commodity food boxes and their health impact on reservations
• 17:26 – Enslaved people’s diets and food-based laws
• 24:56 – The failures of emancipation and emergence of convict leasing
• 30:07 – The 13th Amendment loophole and its impact today
• 32:14 – The Black Panthers’ free community breakfast program
• 34:55 – History of the U.S. school lunch program and fast food in schools
• 38:14 – Americanization policies via school food targeting Mexican-American women
• 43:08 – Impact of racist food branding and policy
• 45:10 – Pet Milk Quadruplets and the history of milk promotion
• 51:29 – Milk, enzymes, and white supremacy
• 52:41 – The USDA, DMI, and marketing food surpluses
• 56:36 – Structural constraints on food "choice"
• 59:50 – Potential legal and structural reforms

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Concluding Remarks

Freeman’s interview lays bare the entanglement of food, race, law, and power in America, pressing listeners to recognize how deeply food politics shape (and are shaped by) inequality. Her analysis is searing, historically grounded, and delivered with both scholarly clarity and accessible urgency.

Recommended for:
Listeners interested in food policy, American history, law, social justice, and anyone ready to confront the uncomfortable roots and realities of what we eat and why.

Transcript

[Kelly Spivey]

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[Andrea Freeman]

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[Andrea Freeman]

Network.

[Kelly Spivey]

Welcome back to New Books and Food. I'm your host, Kelly Spivey. One of the things that I love about food is its versatility. We have a tactile understanding of it and obviously a biologically embedded need for it. It intersects with everything in our lives and humans make food political, and today's guest makes those connections clear and frankly, a little hard to dispute. Andrea Freeman is a national and international expert on the intersections between critical race theory and health and consumer credit. She's a Fulbright Scholar and the author of two books and numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters. Her first book, Skimmed Breastfeeding, Race and Injustice, is currently in development for a documentary, and her second book, which is what We Are Here to Talk About Today, is Ruin Their Crops on the Ground. The Politics of Food in the United States from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch and It's already won the LA Times Book Prize in History and the James Beard Award for Food Issues and Advocacy. Andrea is a Professor of law at Southwestern Law School and is the Chair of the Constitutional Law and Agriculture and Food Law sections of the AALs, co chair of the Law and Society Collaborative Research Network for Critical Race Research and the Law, and a founding member of the Academy of Food Law and Policy, among many others I mean, seriously, I could keep going, but instead I'm going to go ahead and welcome Andrea to the podcast. Thank you, Andrea, for being here to talk about your book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground. Before we like actually get into this book, can you tell me a little bit about what your interest in this subject of food and the law is and kind of how you came to write this book?

[Andrea Freeman]

Absolutely. So I have a long history. The material in this book I have been thinking about for 20 years. So very long. So I started when I was in law school. I took a class and it was cross listed with the architecture department. It was called the Suburbs. And for my paper I wanted to write about fast food and the way that it intersects with race and class and suburbs. And so I wrote a paper called Fast Food Oppression Through Poor Nutrition. And then as time went on, I became a law professor. I kept writing about food and race and developing my ideas and looking at different elements of it and all came together in this book.

[Kelly Spivey]

This has been a long time coming and something that you've been thinking about and keeping an eye on for quite some time. So you've been able to see. I'm imagining a lot of legislation happen and a lot of changes happen.

[Andrea Freeman]

Honestly, I wouldn't say that there has been a lot of change and progress over the years. And I think the biggest change for me has been the lens that I'm using and how broad or narrow it is to think about this topic. Because for a long time I was just thinking about how corporations and the government work together when it comes to food law and policy in ways that particularly harm marginalized groups. But then I started thinking about the history of that even before corporations became really dominant in US Food law and policy and how food had always been used as a tool of oppression and subordination from even before this was a country colonization and then enslavement and the way that we thought about immigration and then all the way up to the present.

[Kelly Spivey]

I mean, you do say very early on in the book that, quote, food inequality's roots as a tool that enslavers relied on to enforce their brutal regimes make it a vestige of enslavement which the 13th amendment forbids. And I think that's the through line of the whole book is continually drawing it back to this actually set of amendments, but particularly the 13th amendment. It's going to be pretty clear how.

[Andrea Freeman]

That.

[Kelly Spivey]

It'S spelled out. Pretty clear. So and accomplished. So we'll start with the first chapter, which centers around the indigenous population and starts with fry bread. Tell me a little bit about the origins of fry bread.

[Andrea Freeman]

There are a few different stories about where it really came from, but one that is commonly accepted is that there were indigenous people incarcerated by the United States and given to eat on only a big sack of flour that was infested with bugs and then some lard. So the ingenuity of the indigenous cooks there, they took these ingredients and made them into this delicious bread. So they fried it in oil to kill all the bugs, and then it tasted great and. And served its purpose of feeding people. And that fry bread evolved into a wider cultural tradition that now is very common among a lot of different indigenous nations and people that can form a kind of pan tribal identity, but also has a bad side to it. Right. So on the one hand, it's this delicious food that's very common, but it's also important to remember it's not a traditional food. It is unhealthy. And a lot of outsider people will look at fry bread as a symbol of indigenous people not taking care of their health, not being, you know, savvy about nutrition, and most importantly, maybe not having it be worth trying to improve the food that goes into indigenous communities, especially when it's coming from the government, because of this idea that, well, they just won't eat it. That's not what they like. They only like unhealthy food. And any problems that they have, any health conditions that are related to food, are their own fault. Right.

[Kelly Spivey]

And you mentioned too, in the chapter, this isn't. You know, this starts the second that colonists show up, basically where they. They take the land, they take the food. One point that you made here, which it seems like it should be common knowledge, but corn requires cultivation, and you have to know how to grow it and process it. So when colonists arrive and destroy that corn, that's a very serious thing to do.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. Let's talk about the title of the book. Because growing their crops on the ground is basically the order that George Washington gave on how to uproot indigenous communities. And it continues and says, and prevent them planting more, because food was a key element of the strategy to get that land by making it impossible for indigenous nations who were living there to. To live and feed themselves. So the US Very deliberately said, let's destroy what they have, make sure they can't do it anymore. They'll be dependent on us. So if they don't just die of starvation, they'll still have to come to us for food, which, you know, was rations, just like this infested flower, or basically bend, you know, we can bend their wills to what, anything we want by being their only source of food.

[Kelly Spivey]

Right. And there's, you know, they have these rations that they can now use for a variety of different coercive purposes that, you know, I. I think a lot of the times you had mentioned earlier when you were talking about the fry bread, like their ingenuity. I don't know if that's ingenuity or just survival.

[Andrea Freeman]

Right.

[Kelly Spivey]

Like, I think it's. Well, no, no, I mean, I. It is ingenuity, but I think that when you say that they have this ingenuity about taking that, like that takes away the responsibility of the person who provided the terrible product to begin with.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yes. I guess the food could have been practically fulfilling, but not as good tasting, though. That's true.

[Kelly Spivey]

You know what? That's true. So at least they made it taste good. Yeah. And then there was another part in the book. I feel like I could just quote the whole book to you, but that's not the point. The US army went so far as to kill the buffalo, and the number that shocked me was 5,000 a day.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah.

[Kelly Spivey]

Just to keep native populations from coming to that area to explicitly to feed themselves.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. And buffalo was not just a source of food, but also using the entire buffalo for different practical elements, tools and clothing, and even as a spiritual part of the community. So losing buffalo isn't just losing food, it's losing something that's just integral to life. Right.

[Kelly Spivey]

And so they've created, like you said, this population of people that is now dependent on them because they've. We've taken everything else they have. And this is when we start to see these commodities boxes. And I would love to talk about just how that comes about. How do they decide what goes in that. Explain what a commodities box is.

[Andrea Freeman]

Okay. Yeah. And so there's kind of a. We just took a big historical leap.

[Kelly Spivey]

Oh, okay.

[Andrea Freeman]

Sorry. All right, so I'll just like, sketch out a little bit of the middle, which is. So first we have the destruction of, you know, traditional ways of eating and sources of food. And then we have rations that are used to, you know, force people to go across the country or turn their children over to the federal Indian boarding schools or to organize their households using a more English way of kinships and families. Right. Because it's built into laws that if people do not marry in certain ways or form families in certain ways, they're going to lose their rations. So rations figure hugely in the politics and society of these relationships. And then eventually what happens after we have Indian reservations? They're very isolated and it's very hard for people living on or near those reservations to get any food. So once the government starts introducing programs to give people food, like in the 1930s, when it comes to people living on or near reservations, that's not going to work. So like food stamps requires you to have a store to go to to spend the stamp money. Right. But if there's no store, that doesn't work. So instead of the government developed a program that created these boxes, which nickname commodities, which were full of items that came out of surpluses of certain agricultural commodities that had been subsidized by the government because couldn't sell enough of them. Right. So we have a lot of kind of rejected food products. And because of the need to store them and keep them for a long time, they're in their worst form. So corn is corn syrup. Right. Soy is soybean oil. You know, meat is in tins and milk is some kind of powdered thing. Right. Nothing is a fresh crop. Like it might sound like it's just rejected surplus food that has to be processed down to something that will preserve for as long as possible. So that's what goes into these commode boxes. And when there is something that's produce, it's usually rotten by the time it reaches a reservation. So the diet that comes out of eating from these boxes, as you can imagine, is conducive to, you know, developing a lot of conditions like type 2 diabetes and other health issues.

[Kelly Spivey]

You quote a doctor that basically refers to them as the equivalent of smallpox infected blankets. The term that I actually really latched onto, I think an indigenous leader mentioned it was nutritional colonialism, which I feel like you could write an entire book about that.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. And, you know, this not being my background, I don't have a lot of expertise or personal experience with it. And yes, these books, There should be a lot of books out there.

[Kelly Spivey]

Yeah. I mean, we need this view from a law standpoint because that is how these things change. Like, I think, well, we can get to that later. But anyway, we're like right at the beginning and I'm already mad and it's.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, no, no, good. Because it's not. It's not just law that can change it. It's law that can entrench it into our systems and allow it to last over generations and centuries.

[Kelly Spivey]

Yeah, yeah. So let's move on to the next chapter, Survival Pending Revolution, which really just talks about slavery. There are so many different ways that this ties to things that happen today that I really want to make sure we're. We can see that. That clear thing. So just talk me through a little bit about where are we starting in slavery? Like, what kind of food are we getting? You know, what. What kind of food are. Are we able to get? Like, procure for ourselves? And then what are some of the laws that are around those things? Because there's one particularly interesting case in South Carolina that I really want to talk about.

[Andrea Freeman]

So, basically, enslavers very calculatedly thought about how much food they would have to give the people that they enslaved in order to allow them to work, because that's was, you know, in their mind, their sole purpose, but not be very thriving and strong enough to revolt or, you know, just kind of resist. So, you know, they would hand around these pamphlets to each other saying, allow each man in the field, you know, one portion of corn mush for a week, or, you know, one piece of meat and that kind of thing. And that the less useful you were to the enslaver, the less food you were going to get. So if you're a child, you weren't going to get a lot. If you were elderly, you weren't going to get a lot. And so that's in terms of, again, kind of rationing out food. Some people had the capacity to grow their own food. And so there was variation in how much an enslaver would allow someone to do that either just to give themselves food or potentially enter a market for food to be able to, you know, make a little money. But that was all very circumscribed, Right. There were no rights for enslaved people to be in the market. If a enslaver wanted to just come and take all their crops, they could do it or take the profits or whatever they wanted. Right. But another theory was that in that way, it could ease some of the burden of enslavers for feeding their enslaved workers or keep people at a level of contentment where they wouldn't kind of blow everything up because things were.

[Kelly Spivey]

Because there was a reason that they might want to do that.

[Andrea Freeman]

Very strong. Yeah. And. But there were a lot of laws in place making it difficult for enslaved people to enter markets. For example, just laws limiting even freed black people from, you know, hunting at certain times or in certain places, you know, being part of any kind of market. And so the law was always the friend of the enslavers. And when the nutrition program, the diet, didn't work out, then instead of saying yes, people are dying because of malnutrition. Usually this was attributed to racial differences which didn't exist. You know, like, oh, well, Africans have different constitutions and they just, you know, they're sicker than us or they don't require different things. So we see the kind of, like, racist biological thinking to justify the deprivation that people had to suffer or certain.

[Kelly Spivey]

Diseases that are a direct result of malnutrition being attributed to specific populations.

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[Andrea Freeman]

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[Kelly Spivey]

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[Andrea Freeman]

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[Kelly Spivey]

Miu defined by you and you do mention like there. There's some laws that try to set up some kind of guardrails against providing insufficient food. But just because there were laws saying that they had to provide a certain amount of food did not necessarily mean that that was happening.

[Andrea Freeman]

Correct. And the reason for those laws was not to protect the enslaved people. It was to protect other enslavers from having people come to their places and steal their food. So that's mostly where you see it come up. It's trying to just keep everyone in their place. And then you could also see in the laws where, let's say, okay, you know, somebody stole a chicken and then you punish them in this way. And the courts are balancing the value of the enslaved person who committed the crime, often because their enslaver told them to versus the actual food that was stolen.

[Kelly Spivey]

This is where I'm Curious about the legal point of this. I guess what you would have to prove is that the law was created because of theft and not. I. I don't know. Like, how. How do you. It's like, that's it. In theory, that sounds like a good law. You know, like, we want to make you see what I'm saying. But, like, in practice, the reasoning for it becoming a law was. Was to solve a very different problem.

[Andrea Freeman]

But as you said, there's basically two cases you can find where court was actually hearing testimony and recording some kind of decision and willing to go against the enslaver because the deprivation was so extreme. Right. But not out of concern for enslaved people, just for maintaining a level of, you know, responsibility for what was then considered your property. Because if enslavers didn't take good enough care, then they were putting that problem out to everybody.

[Kelly Spivey]

You know, the other thing that I. I think is hard to remember is that once emancipation happens, that does not solve the problem. You know, once emancipation happens, essentially all these vagrancy laws start to appear.

[Andrea Freeman]

A really big problem with emancipation is it was like a big political idea, and the people advocating for it as they should have been did not do so adequately because they didn't take into account the actual people and the consequences and their lives and how people being freed, but just freed out into nothing with no support would affect the people that they were ostensibly trying to help. Because to say, okay, you don't have to live here and work here anymore is one thing, but then to completely abandon people and not provide them with the means to then start a life is just. It's. It's awful. Right? And so then we had this response. We had the Freedmen's Bureau set up. We had these institutions giving out food, but it was inadequate food. They couldn't keep up with the need. That was not anticipated. And then what they ended up doing is stopping giving out food, forcing people to go back to the places where they had left and been freed from and enter into extremely burdensome contracts that didn't look that much different from enslavement just so that they could eat and have a roof over their heads. Right? And.

[Kelly Spivey]

And food is important. You know, like, that is. That is. I think, you know, from a distance, it can be easy to say, like, well, you know, they. They just shouldn't have gone back or they shouldn't have done this. Just some kind of, like, bootstrapping type ideology around it. But realistically, if you don't have food and. And the only place you've ever gotten food is where you just came from. It makes sense.

[Andrea Freeman]

Well, it's not even like they found their way. It's that the freedmen's bureau sent people there. Oh. So, yeah, when it's not like people just were like, oh, I might as well go back there. What happened is they went to the bureau to get the, you know, the support that they needed to start new lives. And once there, the people working there said, well, no, you should go to this, you know, plantation and you should enter into this contract because you're going to be fed, you're going to be housed, and we have nothing for you.

[Kelly Spivey]

And then we have convict leasing, and.

[Andrea Freeman]

Then we have another way. So that was one way that south tried to keep its economy going after losing, you know, all the free labor was by pushing people using the Freedmen's Bureau to enter into these exploitative contracts. And another method is what is called convict leasing, which was happening also before emancipation, which is when people convicted of a crime could be. Instead of just kind of being incarcerated, they would be sent to work and so sent out to. Could be agricultural, but it could also be mines and factories and all kinds of industrial work. And so this is an era where some people have said it was even worse than being enslaved, because an enslaved person was part of a community where, as we had mentioned before, the enslaver would at least try to keep them alive. But when it came to convict leasing, there was no investment into the human being, the person. And people were just considered very disposable. So very large amounts of people just drop dead working for free, obviously enslaved and incarcerated into that situation, and nobody cared. They just got replaced with other people. Because it wasn't hard at that time to get people into prisons because of what you had mentioned, these laws, the black codes, that basically made it a crime to do anything. Right. Like, for example, it was a crime to waste your time.

[Kelly Spivey]

Right.

[Andrea Freeman]

To idle about to. You know, basically you could just go up to any black man and say, you have committed a crime. And then the sheriffs that arrest them get money to feed them, which they don't use to feed them, and that's how they make money out of it, and then they send them off. So there's a constant supply of people who now just have no human value to the system at all.

[Kelly Spivey]

And this is what stuck with me about that is there's a lot of these laws that are still on the books.

[Andrea Freeman]

Not exactly, but.

[Kelly Spivey]

Well, yeah, yeah.

[Andrea Freeman]

I mean, those were not allowed. The black.

[Kelly Spivey]

Well, not those, but I'm just saying, like, here, like, for an example, stealing an animal, like a pig or a cow or whatever, that's still a felony and there's still convict leasing, like, I. That's not a secret. I don't think that still goes on. And I just wonder, just to the point of your book, you create these laws that turn, quote, unquote, problematic people into felons so they can no longer vote, they can no longer have a say in what is even happening to them. And then you send them to prison and then lease them out to a company, and this is happening today, would that be kind of a way that you would say, like, the 13th Amendment is still very active? Yes.

[Andrea Freeman]

So if you read a book like Michelle Alexander's the New Jim Crow, where she really talks about this phenomenon of the loophole in the 13th Amendment that says you can put someone into involuntary servitude if they've committed a crime. And then you have all of these crimes, and then you have very racially disproportionate arrests and incarcerations, and you start to see a system that looks very similar to what we had back then.

[Kelly Spivey]

Yeah, I probably have more questions than we have time for on that subject, but it's just such a very large machine that it can be overwhelming to think about. But you also talk about in the chapter, the free breakfast program and the United Front of Cairo and all of these programs. I just want to know what the fear is around food around feeding people. Like, what is the fear there?

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. So one of the signature programs of the Black Panther Party, which was, I'm sure most people know, is sort of like revolutionary anti racist resistance movement that a lot of people associated with, you know, militarism and guns and violence. But one of the key parts of their program was the breakfast program. So it was a free breakfast program for elementary school kids where they would bring kids into community in the morning, feed them a very nutritious breakfast, and just give them a place to socialize and laugh and be together and then go off to school and actually learn something because they weren't hungry. So this was very threatening to the government at that time because it was such a successful program and so community minded that it made the Panthers look good, which is not what the government wanted. It disrupted this common vision of, you know, just like angry black men with guns, because that is never what it was all about. And so the government tried very hard to try to get people to hate this program and stop using it. And they went around and Told parents, oh, they're peeing in their food. And, you know, it's. It's a terrible thing, and nobody should give any. Any money to it or send their kids there. And they were eventually able to shut it all down. And a lot of people attribute the increase in school food given by the government to this need to counter what the Black Panthers had done and just do it themselves. So that wouldn't be needed to be done by a community group. But of course, they didn't do it as well. Right. So they, again, were taking commodity surpluses, giving unhealthy food to kids, and. And also taking away that very communal societal. Just kind of like the love and community that was part of that program and leaving that and using instead this program as a way to support agricultural goals and food and ag industry goals instead of the children who were the heart of it.

[Kelly Spivey]

Yeah, I mean, we can jump around. It's okay. We could talk a little about school lunch, which I believe you said it kind of starts in the Depression era, but it doesn't really latch on until later.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. So they did start. So when it was in the 1930s that this program was developed to support agriculture by buying up surpluses and subsidizing certain foods that it was thought at that time were most needed because people were hungry. And so they needed foods that would fill people up in a quick way. And the nutritional needs of the country changed over time. So eventually the subsidy should have changed to more nutritious foods when people just started having problems due to the content of the food and not the quantity of the food. But back in those days, when they started giving a lot of money to meat and milk and corn and soy, the surpluses partly went into school lunches. But then During World War II, a lot of that food was diverted to go to soldiers. And it was only later that the program turned back to schools. And the National School Lunch Program was developed in the 70s, and they started kind of dumping these unwanted foods into schools, which.

[Kelly Spivey]

It seems like they're dumping these unwanted foods into schools. And then it just increasingly, you know, like, fast foods start showing up in schools, and they can outsource the cooking, they can outsource all of that to a company and have it brought in. Like, there's a lot of moving parts.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, there is. What happened is that. Well, as you know, public schools are underfunded chronically and always trying to save money and potentially make money. And so one way to bring money into schools is to open up the doors to these fast food and junk food companies and allow them to use this incredible marketing opportunity not only just to gain contracts and sell food at schools, but to shape the taste of kids who, you know, if they're eating Lunchables and Dominoes and Doritos at an early age, that's going to be their comfort food for life. Right? That's when we develop our taste. So this incredible opportunity for these companies to be in and schools welcome them because they are willing to pay and the school can make some money from the sales that they make as well. So we kind of like sold off our kids to make these corporate deals and to help the government avoid properly funding the public schools.

[Kelly Spivey]

Like, you don't even have to be in the school eating the food again. We're just going to jump around. But like the chapter, the third chapter that talks a lot about Americanization through homemaking with Mexican American women and which is specifically targeted towards women and girls. There's a mother that talks about her kid, goes to school, eats this food and doesn't want to come home and eat anything that he used to eat all the time.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, it's very powerful.

[Kelly Spivey]

I mean, it's. That's the most effective, right?

[Andrea Freeman]

Exactly.

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[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, so it's like the way to control families is through according to these homemakers at the time these very well meaning, wealthy white women was to target the mother who's the heart of the home and the children who are the future. And that if they can be trained out of eating what they've grown up with and into eating like an American, then that is the pathway to patriotism.

[Kelly Spivey]

You know what we were talking about earlier with the indigenous population, there's a point that talks about kind of this nuclear family ideal, like trying to force this particular idea of family on them. Because in the minds of whoever these homemakers or whatever, a man with a home and family is more dependable and.

[Andrea Freeman]

Less revolutionary and less criminal.

[Kelly Spivey]

If you just be the way we want you to be, you won't get in trouble. It's.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, the books are fascinating. And the way that they try to.

[Kelly Spivey]

Role play well and telling them not to eat the food at the houses of the people they go to because it could make them sick.

[Andrea Freeman]

And obviously the reality is they're sitting there and it's the most delicious food. Way better than what.

[Kelly Spivey]

Yeah. So I just. The school lunch thing and the Americanization thing are. Are really significant, I feel like.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, I think it's interesting too, the way that society, pop culture, and this very institutionalized structural things all intersect here. Right. Because one of the things I put in to there is the first episode of the TV show Fresh off the Boat, right. Which is about this kid, Eddie, and he's going to school for the first time in a new city, and he's bringing his mom home cooked lunch and everybody is, you know, rejecting it and the noodles are worms and get away. And then he insists that he needs to bring lunchables, like all of his friends, to fit in. And that is purely a social pressure. Right. But it works in tandem with what these official government programs were also doing. So it's not just individuals who are racist or ignorant. Right. There's an entire system behind thinking about food in a way that if it's not this very nutritionally low, bland food, then it's not American enough and it's bad.

[Kelly Spivey]

You know, we can talk about. Also, like branding, stereotypes. There was a pretty big reckoning with a lot of things. Aunt Jemima, et cetera. How does that affect things really? If we're taking some of this branding out, but we're still having the policies we have, I don't know. How should we look at that?

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, I think that racist food branding is important. It shouldn't be part of our, you know, social consciousness because it tells us what certain people eat. And similarly to What I was saying about the fry bread, it justifies policies that don't support healthy and nutritious living for some populations because of these stereotypes that just say, it's not us, it's them. It's not worth making healthy food an integral part of school lunches or, you know, WIC or SNAP or any of these things. Things, because people aren't gonna actually embrace it and change their habits. Right. But it's. I don't know. Are you saying, like, where do we rank it? It's all part of one system. Right. And I. That the way people perceive food and diet and race allows a system that continues to create these racial health divides by treating different people differently and without changing people's minds. It's very hard to change policies because the. The policymakers and the corporations, even if they're not generating racism, are exploiting it. I mean, I guess that makes me.

[Kelly Spivey]

Think of, you know, like, the chapter on milk and this just kind of dissonance with having. I think it was. I'm not gonna remember their name. The pet company. The Quadruplets. The Pet Milk quadruplets.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yes. So actually, I don't know if you know this, but if you are interested in their story, I have an entire book about them. Yeah. So my first book is called Skimmed. Okay.

[Kelly Spivey]

I didn't realize it was about them specifically. Okay.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, it tells. It tells their story. And they were the first recorded black quadruplets to survive past birth in the United States. And their doctor, who was very openly racist, you know, white supporter of Hitler. He was also somebody who believed in extraordinary power of vitamin C. And when these quadruplets were born, he decided that he was going to experiment on them by starting to inject them with vitamin C when they were born. And he named them after his own family members. And then he decided to auction them off to formula companies to use them in their promotional materials.

[Kelly Spivey]

When you say auction them, had, like.

[Andrea Freeman]

A bidding war, okay, between, you know, like Carnation and Pet Milk and Borden, whatever, the big formula companies, which was evaporated milk at that time. And they, you know, the highest bidder was able to use them as models. And they were the first black baby models for formula. And so black families use formula at much higher rates than white families always have throughout history. So this very extraordinary marketing campaign takes place over many years. They were the poster girls for pep milk for, like, until they were 18. They had this contract going. But to facilitate this, their doctor arranged for them to be taken away from their family to become, you know, under the guardianship of his nurse that worked for him. And they just have a fascinating life story that's all in the book. And. And that, you know, relates to all of this about race and marketing and milk. And so I discovered their story because when researching material and milk, which is in that chapter and an article that I've written, the Unbearable Whiteness of Milk, I came across this story about breast milk and then found that no one had really written much about this family and their incredible story. Although they were extremely famous because they were on the COVID of, you know, Ebony and they were just, like, beloved by many, many people. They were on tv. They were. They were famous in their time. But anyway, so I ended up taking a little tangent from this. This work I was doing and writing that book first.

[Kelly Spivey]

No, I mean, because that does make a lot of sense that just historically, especially during enslavement, black women were used. Their entire bodies were used, everything they had. Like, so there was nothing left for their family.

[Andrea Freeman]

So. Right. They had to, you know, nurse white kids and to do so being taken away from their own kids.

[Kelly Spivey]

It's very difficult to talk about some of these things when there is the white supremacy portion of it. But you mentioned that Africans were drinking milk 6,000 years ago. So we can start there. And milk is harder to digest without certain enzymes. Thank you. Can you explain why some people may have a harder time than others?

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. So there. There are different things that make milk hard to drink, and one of them is just whether our bodies retain these enzymes that allow us to break down lactose as adults in our bodies, which most people who can do that are from, you know, Scandinavia, northern Europe, white people, and most of the rest of us just have a hard time digesting it. But another element that goes back to what you said about this discovery that's fairly recent, that Africans had been drinking milk before even white people had started, was because of the way that you drink milk. And so the way it's done with us now, it's very, you know, it's. It's oriented to producing milk for consumption in a way that makes money, is cheap, is efficient for us. But you can also drink milk in a way that is good for the cows and the calves and is in, like, the cycle of what they're doing and migration patterns and all kinds of things. So that's the way it was happening back then. But when people. Colonizers went to Africa and saw people drinking milk, they didn't like that way of doing it and insisted that it should be done. In their own way. And so as milk drinking continued, it caused a lot of problems. So in the, you know, early 20th century and before then, people were trying to bring milk out from, you know, rural areas into cities in a way that it wasn't pasteurized, it was being contaminated, and a lot of babies were dying from drinking it. And it was also transmitting a lot of diseases. Milk was getting a bad name. So then we see the development of milk boosters and propaganda, right. Instead of trying to just say, maybe this isn't good for us, right. We see people who are going around telling people, you should drink milk. And one of the main reasons put forth was Aryans drink milk. They are, you know, the people of the strongest and the highest intellect. And so associating whiteness and milk even way back in the 1920s. And that idea has persisted into the present. So now we've seen white, you know, nationalists taking a little symbol of a glass of milk, putting into their Twitter emoji, you know, their Twitter handles, little emojis. And it this association between who are the people who can digest milk? White people, they must be superior, hence white supremacy.

[Kelly Spivey]

When we talk about milk, I really want to Talk. Talk about DMI and just kind of the USDA's, I guess, is that their marketing division?

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah. So what happens is the USDA has a dairy checkoff program, which is when dairy farmers contribute a certain amount of money into a fund that then goes to market their product. And so DMI is the marketing branch of the USDA for dairy, and they engage in all kinds of advertising. Right. So not just the, you know, the ads you see on tv, like the milk mustache or these other very popular and famous campaigns, but also developing products. So like a Domino's seven cheese pizza. Different, you know, they've just worked with Taco Bell, they work with Pizza Hut, they work with all kinds of fast food places to try to increase the amount of. Of cheese in their products. This has a racial impact as well as a social class one, because of which populations are disproportionately eating fast food that is now containing this surplus food that make everybody sick and couldn't sell because people were rejecting it in the first place, is now being fed back into communities that don't have a lot of balance in what they're able to buy. Right? So, like, everybody eats fast food, all races and classes, but it's just some people have to eat more because that is the best way they can use their money to feed themselves and their families. Whereas some people see it More as an indulgence or something, along with more balanced eating. Right. And this also is reminiscent of the old plans to get rid of the cheese surpluses that the USDA had engaged in, where they would just make massive blocks of cheese and then go to poor neighborhoods, toss them out of the back of trucks or put them into the commod boxes.

[Kelly Spivey]

I don't understand how it. How is this legal?

[Andrea Freeman]

This is.

[Kelly Spivey]

This is my big question, because I don't understand how a government entity can have a marketing arm that develops things for a private company.

[Andrea Freeman]

Well, yeah, I mean, so the USDA is responsible for the surpluses that are created by the subsidies that are in the farm bill. So farmers or producers of certain foods are guaranteed income, and they produce as much as they can to get as much money as they can from these government subsidies, but they produce more than people want to buy. But the USDA has to take that extra food that they produce and do something with it. So that's why sometimes you might, you know, see what they're pouring milk down, you know, down the drain or something. But more commonly, they're storing it or they're trying to send it somewhere. So they're trying to send it overseas, or they're trying to put into emergency food, you know, food banks, or they're trying to send it to a public school or any place that will take it, you know, or into formula that will then be given away by wic. So that's. That's not just not illegal. That is their mandate. That is their job. The problem is that the USDA has a double mandate when it comes to this. On the one hand, to assist the agricultural industries by getting rid of this surplus food, and on the other, supposed to be nutrition. Right. And those are in conflict.

[Kelly Spivey]

So this is probably going to bring me to a question that I'm sure a lot of people ask you, like, what, what are we supposed to do? You're talking about fast food and choices. And a lot of times what you hear is that it's about. It's put back on the individual and not structure that that individual is within. Like, there's a big difference between me choosing to go get fast food for dinner when I have three grocery stores really nearby, and someone choosing to get fast food for dinner when the only grocery store is like a corner store where everything is overpriced. Like, the idea of choice is very limited in this framework.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, Choice is basically an illusion that we all need to live under just to keep our sanity. But reality is that you Know, you can only work with what you're given. So if you only have so much money or so much time or, you know, a bus route instead of a car, or, you know, just. There's so many things that decide what we're going to eat, and almost none of them are what we want to eat or, you know, what is going to make us the healthiest. Because I think almost everyone is. The first thing is going to be, what can I afford? Because most people are living on some kind of stretch budget and have to make choices that make sense for stretching the budget for the whole month to eat every day, hopefully three meals a day. You know, maybe your kids are getting some meals at school and that relieves some of it. But that's not going to relieve these other anxieties that we've already talked about, like, how nutritious is the food? Is it culturally appropriate food? Right. All these other issues, at least it's something. But then you still gotta feed everybody else with a limited amount of time. Depends how many jobs you have, where the job is, what time you get home, what's on your route home. Right. There's not a lot of people who can be like, let me set aside three hours on a Sunday and make a big batch of food and I'll eat that all week. I mean, like, that's not realistic. And, you know, what ingredients are available to you. So it's so important to the US Culture to feel that we have agency and choice to the extent where that desire is even exploited by food companies to try to get them out of food regulations that would actually help people. Right. Is like, oh, this one thing is filled with a dye that gives you stomach cancer. Oh, no, we can't take that out because we need choice. Right. Every person should choose for themselves, but the reality is almost nobody's choosing for themselves when it comes to what they eat. So that's just a way of deflecting this, as you said, structural problem onto individuals and saying, if you're not healthy, you need to eat better, and if you don't, that's on you.

[Kelly Spivey]

So, like, what do we do at a legal level? Like, what are the options that we have? I mean, I know, you know, I think everybody says, like, call your congressman, do all of those things. I mean, what. What's the reality of.

[Andrea Freeman]

Yeah, I really think the first step, biggest solution is to try to get corporations out of our food policy and just say that we're going to have separate agencies dealing with industry and dealing with nutrition and that we're actually going to be guided by science. And I mean, this is not a good time. We're not going in that direction now.

[Kelly Spivey]

Not right now, but in the future.

[Andrea Freeman]

Not right now. Honestly. In a way, all of this madness is also pointing to how strong we have, like, lost the way.

[Kelly Spivey]

Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to talk about or anything else that you wanted to add before we kind of wrap up?

[Andrea Freeman]

I feel fine.

[Kelly Spivey]

Thank you so, so much for talking about this with me.

[Andrea Freeman]

My pleasure. I'm so happy that you invited me here to talk to you and that you're excited about it. And, you know, I can't wait to come back and talk to you about Skim.

[Kelly Spivey]

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[Andrea Freeman]

Limu.

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[Andrea Freeman]

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