Phenomenally detailed in its scope and thought provoking in its entirety. If you want a new perspective to food, history, our culture, advertising, racism, sexism, classism, and the intersectionality of all the above you must grab this.

When a book triggers new thoughts and new information that I keep going back to in my post-read days. . .it gets all the stars. This is a non-fiction yell for someone out there to Pay Attention! Something Over Here is Broken and Needs to Be Fixed! Well, I'm listening and pondering, and thinking differently about the topics Andrea Freeman discusses.

Straight from the author's Table of Contents, the chapter titles show how she will walk readers through how ". . .US law and politics have used food as a weapon of conquest and control":
1. Weapons of Health Destruction
2. Survival Pending Revolution
3. Americanization Through Homemaking
4. The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk
5. School Food Failure
6. Racist Food Marketing
7. What’s Law Got to Do with it?

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground traces the history of how food oppression in the United States has shaped cultural norms to make racial health disparities appear natural and impossible to fix through government intervention. The opposite is true. Legal and political acts, not cultural preferences, have baked these disparities into our society. This law and policy, which extends all the way back to Washington’s order to starve Indigenous nations and enslavers’ careful calibration of food portions to fuel labor but not revolt, is unconstitutional. It is not too late to change course.

Andrea Freeman. Ruin Their Crops on the Ground (Kindle Locations 157-161). Kindle Edition.

This book isn't one providing specific answers (although there are hints) - it is the pin poking, question posing conversation starter. It argues for more outrage if that's what it takes to grow understanding, which motivates curiosity, which leads to real change. No one should be ok with George Washington's order to Ruin Their Crops on the Ground .

No.one. A flag has been raised.

*A sincere thank you to Andrea Freeman, Henry Holt & Company, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.*

A look into how the United States has created a system that forces people of color to consume less nutritious food through systems it has put into place. The first few chapters provide a historical look into the US's destruction of cultures' food and how white foods came to be seen as the "better" choice on a group to group basis. Then, the next few chapters discuss more modern problems from all perspectives.

I thought this was well-researched and easy to read. It is such an important book too. There was also just a lot about SNAP and other modern food issues that I did not know about before this. Teachers could easily take a chapter of this and incorporate it into class. For instance, a look at indigenous history in the United States could incorporate that first chapter. I definitely will be using information I learned here in my classroom.

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This has a lot of information that I never would’ve thought about and is a great place to start looking more into the subject. It has a vast amount of references that you can go through during or after you read it. While it is a lot of information and therefore slow to read, it may be worthwhile to you

An incredibly important read for anyone living in the USA. There are so many stereotypes addressed and dismantled even within the first chapters. This is a great read for anyone interested in how we have politicized and weaponized food in the US, specifically against marginalized, indigenous and global majority communities.

The history student in me wants even more in depth information, but this is a super approachable non-fic, coming in under 300 pages, for new readers. It never felt overwhelming, but was definitely a reality check - even being aware of this part of our modern history.

Thorough but easy to read. This nonfiction about how food and its access have always been political in America piqued my interest. Well researched I would recommend this to anyone looking to more about how American policies are racist even around food.

I wasn’t very far into this book before I read a statistic that floored me: 80% of Blacks and 90% of Asians are lactose intolerant. Think about this. If you’re like me, you were served milk for lunch every day throughout your childhood, and everyone took it for granted that it was healthy for all children. Andrea Freeman unpacks this amazing statistic and many others over the next several chapters. Food choices are not based on good nutrition for every child, they are based on lobbying by the food industry. Minority immigrants have been subject to efforts to “Americanize” their eating and cooking habits since early in the 20th century. Enslaved people received food inferior to their white owners. Indigenous people were denied their traditional Three Sisters (corn, squash and beans), and were often given only flour and lard, from which they made fry bread, a tasty but nutritionally empty treat. The combination of these has, without exception, resulted in immigrants and indigenous populations being given advice which increased their fat and sugar intake and decreased their fruits, vegetables and the foods that were part of their heritage.

While I very much appreciated the information in this book, I grew discouraged at the fact that it seems as though corporate influence on our diets visit so deeply entwined in our national policies that it is hard to imagine that it can ever be untangled. Still, it is good, well researched information like this that will allow us to take the first steps forward.

Many thanks to Metropolitan Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

In our modern society, there are so many tools of coercive control, typically fear, but there are other, sneakier methods used to maintain our stratified society. In Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States…. Andrea Freeman, professor at Southwestern Law School, surveys the way access or disruption of access to food has been utilized to control non white populations.

The title is drawn from a quote of George Washington, who commanded his soldiers to do this when in conflict with indigenous Americans. From these initial clashes of culture, Freeman moves through major eras of American history arguing that U.S. food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. Chapters focus on removal of Indigenous peoples from land in favor of settler colonialism, slavery of African Americans, “education” of immigrants, milk, the costs of the free school lunches and the racist system of food marketing.

It is a book that exposes the dark side of the modern American food systems explaining many origins and their racist or coercive assumptions and exposing yet another industry largely focused on profit above all else. The chapter on milk is especially telling, as our ability to digest milk outside of childhood is very closely tied to our genetic ancestry.

Recommended to readers of contemporary America, food equity and access or History.

Thank you to Netgalley for a digital ARC of this book.

I hope to be relieved of my COVID haze soon so I can write thoughtful review. I really appreciated the time and effort the author put into this book and the great amount of research that was done.

The way it was divided up into each chapter and how those chapter focused on not just a subject but a span of time and how that issue continues to harm the marginalize populations to this day.

I really hope this book becomes a popular book of the summer or the year or year to come. Just as long as people read it!

In the vein of The Color of Law, this book is an excellent choice if you’re looking to learn about policy that will make you furious, without talking about the current election cycle. Freeman clearly demonstrates how nominally helpful and positive food policy in the United States is most helpful to large-scale agribusinesses and the processed food industry, not the people who end up consuming food through the programs. Food policy and government assistance programs are not my area of expertise, but I do think Freeman pushes a bit too far with some of her analogies, particularly in the final chapter of the book. That being said, the conclusion that the system is broken and ill-designed if the intention is to actually help those who experience food insecurity is undeniable.

Recommended read for those who have an interest in social justice initiatives, policy making, or who have ever wondered what the story was behind government cheese.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for an honest review.

Ruin Their Crops On The Ground by Andrea Freeman in the book the author mostly relies on sentiment, ignorance and preference as opposed to fax in hard data. In the first chapter she uses the whole debacle with round up and farmers getting a grant to say they did this so lesser income families couldn’t afford it which isn’t true at all. The poor farmers got grants from the government they were suffering throughout the depression and those grants really saved a lot of farmers that would have lost their livelihood otherwise. In the chapter about milk and its whiteness she start with the racist joke from The black Web and then then went on to say that the colonizers who wanted milk like they had back in England did that to be racist, despite the fact that the natives in most minorities are lactose intolerant. I also found it funny that she didn’t once mention that it’s called lactose intolerance and just kept saying it was like poison and caused them cramps and discomfort ETC. Just an FYI my dad my husband and one of my daughters are also lactose intolerant and we’re absolutely white. They also had some very sad chapters in the book like the one where she spoke of individual slaves in there horrible treatment by their“owners. Then we got to school lunches and OMG the descriptions of the lunches these poor students got including one as recent as 2022 in Saint cloud Minnesota is just terrible. I always sent my children with lunch but I know some people cannot afford that and it is sad the food they serve these children especially those nine tater tots and a hotdog with no bun and I have no solution for that but do want to say I always admire those who fight for a good cause like racism but one should really have a side goal in facts to back it up in Naches racist statements from the 1800s or even those by Nixon in the 1970s what’s the deal with what’s happening today it is easier to upset people when using sentiment and smoke and mirrors to make them think something is racist when did actually happen eons ago and I’m sure they have racist people roaming the earth today as well as those who dislike fat people the disabled ATC I wish someone would come out with a book that actually has a solution as opposed to just wanting to fire up the peanut gallery. Racism is a real problem so please come with a real argument when writing a book about it. Had I known this was the author who wrote the book Sckim, about breast-feeding, racism and formula companies , that had nothing but falsities in it I would’ve gave it a pass but I thought maybe she’s grown since then and so I thought I would read it and kept thinking about the books I could’ve been reading instead and wondering if everything in the book was as true as it was in skim. Please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

I enjoyed each individual chapter of this book a lot, but it did feel like the overall thesis/theme that was pitched at the beginning was lost a bit as the book progressed.
I do not want to remotely discount the research and thought that went into this, but it almost read as if the author was writing this thesis and started to run out of time. Maybe of the later points are supported by random tweets and generalizations (that I didn't necessarily disagree with) felt less supported.
STILL I really did find this so interesting. Definitely the first of many food justice books I'd love to dive into.

Wow, this was an incredibly hard book to read and every page was worth the pain. Ruin Their Crops on the Ground was incredibly well written and heartbreaking. I had some understanding of the depths of inequality in the United States of American but I had no idea it was this insane. Freeman lays out the historic and present barriers people face in accessing food in America and if this doesn't make you mad, I worry that something is wrong with you. Great read, please buy this book when it comes out and expand your understanding of food politics in America's past, present, and future.

It is so easy to be oblivious of the content in this book. Easily laid out, Freeman is able to teach in the most straightforward manner of the unjust policies that have infiltrated the "land of the free" when it comes to food. While some may feel as though they are safe because they don't fit specific criteria, it really does affect everyone. I love the detailed information and sources to back it up.

An important study of how European colonizer settlers impoverished and indoctrinated food impoverishment into the United States governing factors for Indigenous, Black, and Latin people. The book focuses each chapter on one aspect of this food inequity system from the historical beginning of white supremacy on the continent through to recent years where not much has really changed.

An excellent takedown of the unjust policies that have become ingrained in the food policies of the United States, from the country's origins right up through the present day. It's not like I've been completely unaware of anything of what Andrea Freeman covers here, but this is genuinely the first time that it's all been laid out for me so clearly, thoroughly, and comprehensively in such an accessible (and also genuinely infuriating) read. It's also an incredibly well-researched read, to boot - Freeman brings an impressive amount of receipts to back her claims, to the point that almost half the book is footnotes.

This is book I would call a must-have both both public library shelves and academic libraries like the one I work at - not to mention an excellent all-around book just for anyone looking for an incredibly read book. Though I will say this - prepare to get upset (and very justifiably so).

5/5 stars
Recommended if you like: nonfiction, medical anthropology, social justice, food studies

This review has been posted to Goodreads as of 2/13 and will be posted to my book blog on 3/19 and to Instagram on 4/5.

Wow. I cannot sing the praises of this book enough. It goes in-depth into the way food and food policy has been, and continues to be, weaponized as a means of control. I got my BA in anthropology and got very into medical anthropology when doing that, so I knew a little about the stuff Freeman talked about, but she goes into detail and provides a lot of context for these topics and clearly elucidates the historical-to-contemporary connections. I learned a lot of new information from this book and found that it was presented in a very understandable manner. This is definitely one of those books that I think everyone should read.

The book is broken up into seven chapters and an introduction, the first three chapters each focus on an ethnic and cultural group in the US: Native American, Black, and Hispanic. In each of these chapters, Freeman looks at the traditional foods eaten by those groups and the benefits those foods provide nutritionally. She then examines how colonialization altered those foods and forced people in these groups to start eating according to how white people wanted them to, often switching from highly nutritious foods to foods of subpar quality and foods with empty calories (i.e., bison to canned meat, hand-made corn tortillas to white bread, etc.). From there she discusses the impacts, historically and modern-day, of those changes and the actions some people are taking to return to traditional foods.

I already knew some of the stuff covered in these chapters, but it was absolutely horrifying to learn more of the details and I found them to be very informative. It feels weird to say I liked these chapters because so much of the information contained in them is horrifying, but it's something I haven't seen touched on in too much depth in my studies and I want to learn about it. It's these chapters in particular that I feel people should read because they're so informative and provide a lot of historical and contemporary context, and I think it really showcases how things are connected through time.

The next two chapters of the book focus on specific aspects of American food and food policy. Chapter 4 looks at milk and the USDA's ties into the dairy industry. A majority of people in the world are lactose intolerant (including me, lol), though population to population the percentage changes, with Caucasians having some of the highest percentages of lactose persistence into adulthood. Not only did Freeman use this chapter to discuss the inadequacy and capitalistic-driven motivations of the USDA's milk requirements, but she also uses it to dive into the health issues associate with dairy products, as well as the racist rhetoric surrounding milk in the past and present. Chapter 5 looks at school lunches and again targets the USDA's Big Agriculture ties for why school lunches lack nutrition. Freeman also uses this chapter to touch on school lunch debt and the myriad of ways policies surrounding lunch debt serve to humiliate and starve children.

I found these two chapters to be interesting and informative in a different way than the preceding chapters. Like with the first three, I did already know a lot of what Chapter 4 covered before going into it. Milk, lactose intolerance/persistence, and the USDA were things we discussed in my medical anthro class, but the historical ties and legal efforts to change (or not change) things were new to me. I also didn't know a lot of the negative health side-effects Freeman discussed in the milk chapter and it was definitely eye-opening. Chapter 5 was interesting to me because I rarely ate school lunch as a kid, and then as a late-middle schooler and in high school I did school online so I wasn't exposed to a lot of the stuff Freeman discussed in the chapter. I definitely remember the school lunches though and how they often lacked veggies and seemed always to contain a milk carton. It was super interesting to read the politics behind what goes into school lunches and how laws to change them or keep them the same were often tied into monetary interests.

Chapter 6 talks about racist food marketing and turns somewhat away from food itself and focuses on how branding utilizes some of the things discussed in chapters 1-3 to brand food, advertise to certain groups, or both. It was definitely disgusting to hear about the racist marketing techniques and how long it took companies to actually start doing better. Chapter 7 looks into the laws surrounding food policy, and SNAP in particular, which is an area I don't know too much about. I found the discussion to be very interesting and am definitely interested in seeing how this area of law and policy develops over time, hopefully in a positive way.

Overall I found this book to be very impactful and informative. I've already recommended it to 3 or 4 people and definitely think this is an area of study more people should know about. I'll probably check out Skimmed by this author as well.

This book holds nothing back and is laid out amazingly well with historical facts, personal stories from each timeline, the politics, and policies that were created to make certain conditions exist, and then brings the politics and policy to the present day to show where we are as a result.

Food... Something simple, basic, and necessary to survival has been weaponized and used as control. This book shows telling ways of how tactics, stemming from the birth of this nation under Washington, were used to deconstruct and divide. The way this book was written is so powerful and impactful that it is now difficult to walk through stores without looking at certain brands and not truly realizing the history of their existence. It has never been easy to drive through a food desert community, but fully comprehending the systematic rationale behind it should cause every reader to question why this system works so well... in every city USA. A small part of the book seemed to be an exhaustive view of food brands and their politics. When I got to those parts of the book, I wanted to learn more about who was responsible - or at least how to make changes. I will read this again and I am sure I will see new meanings in various aspects.

One thing is certain, the concept of "ruin their crops on the ground" has evolved. This book skillfully draws out the methods. We are all impacted.

What a dynamic and chilling political history of food policy in the Unites States. Like so much of country's defining social policies, the root cause is racism. While most of us know on some level that white supremacy is the underpinning of much American history, to see it in all its well-researched and outlined glory was an eye-opener.

Freeman's research absolutely shines here. When a book is 40% bibliography, the nerds are going to rejoice. While drawing many subtle connections across policy and history, the author never backs down from placing the blame directly where it belongs: with racist and elitist social policies. It is refreshing to read an analysis of food policy that doesn't default to individual responsibility and instead outlines, and understands, the social determinants of health.

My only quibble, and this is pervasive in public health and the greater health care industry so I can't really blame Freeman here, is the constant use of obesity rates as the primary marker for health outcomes. It is a little disappointing to see someone run right up to the flawed health model used in this country, then make a hard swerve away from the next step in reforming public and individual healthcare. Granted, one step at a time is probably needed here and decolonizing what we "know" about food and nutrition policy is good first step.

Overall a very informative read on the history of white-washing food policy in the United States. I would group this with The Truth about Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England and The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market as a trio of primers on how we got to 2024's sad state of affairs.

This was a really informative and insightful read. I had pieces of a lot of the information presented here -- how important food was to projects of "Americanization" that targeted immigrant families, the horrible food economics of chattel slavery, etc. But the great thing about this book is it pulls all these together and the author doesn't flinch about drawing a straight line to how these policies and decisions still impact people today.