“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.
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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