AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Food is a basis for human life, happiness, and freedom - also oppression, according to Andrea Freeman, professor at Southwestern Law School.
ANDREA FREEMAN: The U.S. government, even before this became the United States, has used food to subordinate people for political and economic means.
RASCOE: In the 18th and 19th centuries, for instance, settlers in the U.S. government slaughtered bison in order to contain and control Indigenous people. When farming failed to catch on, the government handed out food rations. Freeman says these rations were largely unhealthy, similar to the commodity boxes of highly processed foods that Native communities are given today. Her new book is titled "Ruin Their Crops On The Ground: The Politics Of Food In The United States, From The Trail Of Tears To School Lunch."
FREEMAN: The title, "Ruin Their Crops On The Ground," comes from George Washington who commanded, this is the deliberate policy that we are going to enact, and that Indigenous people starve, die, disappear. So rations have become this program that still makes Indigenous people sick and have very bad outcomes when it comes to obesity and diabetes and short lifespans.
RASCOE: How do you parse or look at the differences between, say, intentionally massacring bison, messing up the food supply for native tribes, versus what's happening now with food programs?
FREEMAN: So, fortunately, we're not living through time right now where we're seeing outright massacre or enslavement or anything. And I can't directly compare that. But we still have health disparities in deaths and serious illnesses that are a result of the food policies that began then and continue into today.
RASCOE: You also talk about the African American experience. And obviously, food was used to control Black people who were enslaved. But I think there's less attention on the fact of how food was used to control Black people even after emancipation. You write that, quote, "without food, freedom simply meant death."
FREEMAN: When emancipation happened, the Freedman's Bureau was created and gave out rations. But then quickly realized that this was not going to serve the former plantation owners who were trying to get formerly enslaved people back onto their plantations to work because their economic system had collapsed. So the government cut off the supplies of food so that people would be forced to go back and work under really similar conditions that they were enslaved under.
RASCOE: There's a whole chapter in your book about milk. And, you know, historically, milk has been advertised as a healthy nutritious drink. There have been all these campaigns. Milk does a body good, got milk, and I looked at them as quite innocuous. Just, you know (laughter), what's wrong with milk? But you brought out a dark side of milk. Can you talk about that?
FREEMAN: Sorry about that. Yeah (laughter). Well, those campaigns have been necessary from the beginning because milk causes a lot of problems. So pasteurization didn't take away all of the health problems that are associated with milk. Those have been there all along. The most minor one is lactose intolerance. The people who can actually drink milk without feeling bad is a part of the population that come from Northern Europe and Scandinavia. And everybody else has problems with it. The amount of milk being drunk has declined over now 30 or 40 years steadily. So we have these efforts made with these fantastic campaigns that you're referencing there, and those campaigns are actually created through a USDA government program, trying to boost the sale of milk.
RASCOE: In your book, you bring up these contrasts, because a lot of the foods that you talk about in this book that are not necessarily healthy foods. This comes up with, I believe, the fry bread with Native Americans and government cheese and corn bread, and, you know, all these kind of fried foods.
FREEMAN: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
RASCOE: But people come to associate them with growing up, and they love a lot of this food, whether you think of soul food or what have you. What's your message to those people who, while some of the food may not be healthy, this is food that they actually really enjoy?
FREEMAN: I mean, it's delicious food. So that makes perfect sense, right? I think the problem is not with people eating and loving that food. The problem is with outsiders blaming people for their own health problems based on their love of the foods, right? And the origin of a lot of these foods, like fry bread - fry bread came about because Indigenous people were given some flour that was infested, you know, with bugs and oil and almost nothing to eat. And then they created this incredibly delicious dish. The reason for all of these health problems and disparities is not people's love of good food. It's what they're given to work with.
RASCOE: What do you think needs to be done?
FREEMAN: I mean, I think that our food system and policy should not be guided by corporate interests, which is the way that it is right now. Basically, agricultural companies are guiding what happens with government subsidies and these USDA programs that are supposed to be helping people like WIC and are actually helping corporations more than people.
RASCOE: That's Andrea Freeman. She is the author of the new book "Ruin Their Crops On The Ground: America's Politics Of Food From The Trail Of Tears To School Lunch." Thank you so much for joining us.
FREEMAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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