Whether you are a seasoned food justice activist, legal scholar, or just anyone interested in dipping their toes into neglected parts of American history, Andrea Freeman’s Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch is likely to teach you a bunch of things you didn’t already know about food-related policies and their use as tools of control.

The book is written in a really accessible style, with lots of interesting anecdotes from members of impacted communities in their own words. The scholarship uniting those tidbits with the large-scale social/political patterns in which individual lives unfold is pretty impressive.

I was initially drawn to Freeman’s work on milk/dairy, but I’m glad I didn’t stop there – she provided lots of insight about Native foodways, assimilationist pressures on various immigrant communities, and the ways in which slavery and its aftermath were/are intertwined with food policies, among other things!