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Podcast: New Books in American Politics
Episode: Andrea Freeman, "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)
Description: The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dump...