Food as a tool of oppression

Editor's note: This podcast episode is the first in our Don't Call Me Resilient live event series. Our next event — "AI-generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation?" is coming up on Wednesday February 5th in Toronto — and we'd love for you to be there! Attendance is free. Click here to learn more and save your seat! 

Food is so much more than what we eat.

It is, of course, nourishment — the food we put into our body to fuel ourselves. It can be joyful, like the the smell of pancakes wafting through the house on a Sunday morning, or when loved ones gather around a feast at the dinner table. It can also be deeply personal and defining, connecting us to ancestral history, and cultural and racial identities. And it is also political — especially in the United States — which is the key takeaway in a new book by law scholar Andrea Freeman. 

Last fall, we sat down with Andrea to discuss her book in the first conversation of our new live events series from Don't Call Me Resilient. In this new episode, we bring you an edited version of that conversation.

The book — Ruin their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United State from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books/Raincoast) — is a history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control.

Freeman is a professor at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles. Much of her work explores food oppression and examines how food and law policy are influenced by corporate interests, which disproportionately impact and harm marginalized communities.

In her book, Prof. Freeman argues that food law and policy have created and maintained racial and society inequality in the U.S., which she says amounts to "food oppression."

Our conversation was wide-ranging. We covered some fascinating topics, including the love/hate relationship with frybread, how milk became a symbol of white supremacy and how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been using nutrition programs — including "government cheese" and the National School Lunch Program — as a dumping ground for unwanted agricultural surpluses since the Great Depression.

Freeman's book also explains how this longstanding oppression has produced racial health disparities, resulting in higher rates of diabetes, disease and even premature death among Black, Indigenous and Latino communities.

Although the picture is bleak, Freeman — a constitutional law scholar — provides some potential avenues for change, vis-a-vis reparations and the U.S. Constitution.

In her concluding chapter, she writes:

"Corporations do not feel compassion. Sickness and loss do not move them. Appealing to their humanity is not an effective political strategy. Looking to the White House and its agencies for solutions has yielded only temporary results at best. The Obama era saw improvements in school lunches that Donald Trump swept away during his brief tenure. Joe Biden reinstated stricter guidelines, and the corporations stood ready to beat them back down again. In the face of near-complete capture of the legislative and executive branches, it is time to turn to the courts."

In addition to the podcast episode, you can read an excerpt from Freeman's book about frybread — a simple, versatile "comfort food" for many Indigenous communities that she says embodies the contradictions that have dictated Indigenous food and health in North America since colonization.

If you'd like to stay up-to-date on the remaining events in our series, follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Another Story Bookshop in Toronto on Nov. 14, 2024. The episode was hosted and produced by Executive Producer Vinita Srivastava and co-produced by Associate Producer Ateqah Khaki, with support from Consulting Producer Jennifer Moroz. Ryan Clarke was our on-site audio engineer and mixed the episode.