Food Discrimination

 “Ruin Their Crops in the Ground – the Politics of Food in the U.S. From the Trail of Tears to School Lunch” by Andrea Freeman, 2025

This is the story of food politics in the U.S., and its use as an oppressive tool against minorities – Indigenous, African-Americans and Latinos.  It is much like the genocide in Gaza against Palestinians, which is a quick starvation, but in this case, somewhat slower.  Freeman studiously ignores class, even though most dark-skinned people are working-class.  She does this because the book seems to be preparation for a legal brief based on the 13 and 14 Amendments to the Constitution, alleging that the ‘badges and incidents of slavery’ are still being used against darker-skinned people - specifically bad food.  ‘Working-class’ is not a protected category in U.S. law – so skin color, gender and ethnicity are still available to the lawyerly and the left-liberal. 

Freeman’s legal proposal is a stretch, given past Supreme Courts have only occasionally nodded to the 13-14 Amendments in discrimination cases.  It is also a stretch because both political parties, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), fast food and Big Ag, along with swathes of the U.S. population would argue that the addictive, nutrition-less, ultra-high processed and toxic food dumped on poorer people are just tasty ‘good eats.’  Some workerist Marxists might agree.  Given the ‘illusion of agency’ through advertising this is to be expected.

In a sense Freeman’s argument runs along the lines of ‘environmental racism’ – though food is more intimate than that.  For her it leads to ‘food inequality’ and ‘racial health disparities.’  These include high levels of diabetes, heart disease and cancer among the disadvantaged.

Food Damage and the Indigenous

Tearing up Native crops and ruining deer parks was just the beginning.   Killing the buffalo was next.  The rations doled out on reservations to Native Americans were inadequate, spoiled or missing – the immediate cause of the 1862 Dakota rebellion in Minnesota.  Freeman thinks Native ‘frybread’ was concocted at a fort to ward off starvation, using a few prison-like ingredients.  It leads to obesity and diabetes according to her.  Indian boarding schools forced native kids to eat English foods - milk, butter, cream and cheese - though indigenous people are 80% lactose intolerant.  Lactose results in a number of health problems – obesity, stomach ailments and kidney problems.  Nutrition-less white breads, carcinogenic processed red meat, sugary beverages, candy, salt and sugar were also in abundance at these schools, along with short haircuts and store-bought clothes.  Fruits, bison and vegetables were not. These are still the ingredients of present federal food programs on reservations (FDPIR), including the ‘commodity box.’  Dr. Neal Barnard has called ‘commod’ food the ‘nutritional equivalent of small-pox infected blankets.’  The boxes are full of shelf-stable canned foods, so some turn to corn syrup, sugar and carbs instead.  Diabetes deaths among the indigenous are 177% higher than others.

These ingredients are part of corporate welfare for agricultural producers, as crops like milk and cheese, meat, soybeans, corn, sugar and wheat are price supported by the government, partly by buying excess production.  They supply school lunch programs, food programs in communities and reservations, prisons and detention camps, WIC and SNAP, all unhealthy for dark-skinned people.  She ignores light-skinned workers who are damaged by bad food, except for a few TV references - something Marx and Engels were already aware of in 1860s’ Britain among factory workers.  

African-Americans

Slaves were not fed well, as food was an afterthought. 50% of the children born into slavery died in the first year from malnutrition, even with laws dictating a certain diet to keep ‘property’ alive.  Sometimes only cornmeal and water were provided, which forced slaves to steal or hide food where they could.  Sometimes they were fed waste from the boss’s table, sometimes slop dumped in troughs. Diseases like pellagra, beriberi, rickets, scurvy, anemia, kwashiorkor and pica abounded among slaves.

Slaves were forbidden from growing their own food or selling it.  During the Civil War, ‘contraband’ slaves flocked to the Union Armies and were still hungry.  This continued until the Reconstructionist Freedmen’s Bureau, which fed freedmen and woman and established hospitals.  Later sharecropping African-Americans were forced to work for former masters, who would sell them substandard food at plantation stores.  Jim Crow convict leasing and segregation did the rest.  Prison food was waste meat and white bread, and it still is.  In 1925 a USDA survey found 8 of 10 African-American families subsisted on diets that didn’t meet minimum nutritional recommendations.  In the 1960s Southern segregationists cut off government food to combat voter registration drives. Food is a weapon.

Government Cheese

USDA surplus food programs supplied poor African Americans the same kind of foods delivered to Native Americans. This is where the famous and free ‘government cheese’ came from.  Yet African-Americans are 80% lactose intolerant too.  Freeman references the Black Panther’s successful breakfast programs that spread to 45 cities.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called these programs “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”  Food is a weapon on both sides evidently.

Unlike some Black leftists, Freeman does not oppose fatty, fried, salty and sweet ‘soul food’ as a dietary problem, though she points out that more black people percentage-wise than whites have now become vegan or vegetarian.  She illustrates the well-known predominance of toxic fast food joints in poor neighborhoods, leading to all kinds of health problems.

Latinos and Latinas

Mexican and Latin American diets were rated substandard by racist ideologues in government, as they did not conform to ‘whiteness.’  Subsequent “Americanization’ programs aimed at removing Mexican foods and replacing them with ‘an American diet’ – which is now called SAD, the Standard American Diet. Freeman digs into a 1925 program called the “Americanization Through Homemaking” manual, which advocated model kitchens, ‘home teachers’ and European food for Latinos, ignoring the healthy foods already existing Latino culture – fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, cacti, avocados and herbs.  They even bitched about hot peppers.

Freeman says the 5 top foods now consumed by Latino children in households with one U.S. born person are:  soda, low-fat milk, pizza, ketchup and white bread.  These are highly-processed foods containing sugars, calories, salt, saturated and trans fats, none of which is good for health.

School Lunch Programs

In the 1990s the World Food Policy Center called the U.S. school lunchroom ‘a toxic food environment.’  School lunches are partly controlled by the USDA, an agency that represents Big Ag. Fast food outlets like Pizza Hut, KFC and McDonalds have also invaded schools as part of a privatization effort. Private sub-contractors have been hired to replace school lunch workers and kitchens, providing the cheapest food they can.  Freeman dwells on the realities of lunch debt and lunch shaming.  8 states have made school lunch free, removing the problem of lunch debt.  She references kids who used to bring healthy Asian or Mexican food to school and were laughed at by the morons snarfing Lunchables.  After humiliations, one Columbian boy wanted ‘American’ food and only ate pizza and hamburgers.

American food?

Hot dogs and American cheese are still go-tos on many school menus, as meat and dairy make up two-thirds of school food.  Chocolate milk is also still served.  In 2019 40 million kids participated in school food marketing contests run by the Dairy Council, the NFL and outfits like PepsiCo.  And so it goes, even with efforts to bring organic, ethnic, fresh and healthy food into schools.  

Milk

Freeman spends a whole chapter on how milk products are toxic for minorities, without also mentioning their environmental, animal or community damage.  Right-wingers have equated the color of milk with whiteness and used milk cartons as symbols.  Freeman mentions a Neo-Nazi protest at an art show in New York, where bare-chested fascists equating milk with ‘whiteness’ publicly guzzled quarts in their opposition to ‘the vegan agenda.’ For years the USDA has required milk given or sold to schools as a prop to the dairy industry, and forbids any milk alternatives like soy, flax or oat.  This even though 90% of Asians are lactose-intolerant, higher than other minorities.  95% of European-Americans are not, unsurprisingly. 

Prior to 1895 before pasteurization, 49 out of 100 kids died from milk contamination, as it spoiled within hours or carried cow tuberculosis.  At one point the USDA stored millions of pound of government cheese because the market was oversaturated.  This cheese found its way into poor people’s diets across the country, from reservations to ghettos to schools to food banks to prisons. (This hints that food production could be almost free.) Freeman discusses advertising campaigns to push milk funded by the USDA and private sources. In 2018 the AMA told the USDA to make milk optional in their guidelines. The USDA still promotes low-end baby formulas for newborns through WIC instead of breast milk. Again, promoting the unhealthy but profitable alternative. 

Conclusion

As urbanites have found out, the great cuisines of indigenous north America, Asia, Latin America, Africa and India are not to be ignored.  This makes the current USDA / Farm Bill crop protections and guidelines archaic.  They are the edible version of U.S. nationalism and profiteering.  Freeman suggests that a lawsuit based on violations of the 13-14th Amendments would be a chance to reverse food damage to all minorities. She lists cases that both encourage this tactic and discourage it.  There are more of the latter and given the current Supreme Court, this approach is a dead end – except as a propaganda exercise. 

Freeman thinks in order to combat racism, the Food Bill needs to be re-written and the USDA needs to focus on healthy food and not cow-tow to Corporate Ag, while Congress needs to break from Big Ag. However corporate capture of the federal government is nothing new, nor is the intimate relation of poverty to capitalist class society, nor the endless existence of racism as a ruling-class strategy.  Without a new Left-Labor-Populist electoral-activist party dedicated to the whole working class and a revolutionary socialist movement, these reforms will not come about.  The bourgeoisie is not able to accede to even democratic changes anymore, and that is crucial to know.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “food,” “farms,” “USDA,” “Farm Bill,” “vegan,” “Big Meat,” “Big Ag.”

And I got it at the Library!  May Day has a good selection of left-wing books on food.

Red Frog / July 23, 2025