Andrea Freeman’s Ruin Their Crops is a bracing book— one that refuses to let law stay above the fray. The book’s title, drawn from President Washington’s command to “ruin their crops on the ground,” is more than historical reference; it’s a theory of power, waste, and control that pulses through this work with moral clarity. By centering food policy — a topic too often siloed as agricultural or technocratic — Freeman exposes how law actively structures hunger, malnutrition, and even food destruction in marginalized communities. This book is a powerful reminder that access to food, a fundamental socioeconomic right, is not peripheral to law, but one of its central battlegrounds. As Freeman stated in a recent interview, “It is the ground we stand on that sustains us. And it is this truism that frequently creates the illusion of alimentary choice while obscuring the structural racism embedded in U.S. American food politics.”
At a time when legal scholarship celebrates doctrinal complexity while distancing itself from lived experience, Ruin Their Crops does the opposite. Freeman pulls law down from abstraction and grounds it, quite literally, in the soil. She maps a legal genealogy of waste — from federally funded crop destruction to racialized school lunch programs — showing how food becomes a weapon, and hunger, a byproduct of governance. The book does what great legal scholarship should: it makes us see familiar structures differently, then implicates us in their ongoing design.
Her work has been featured in outlets like NPR, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, further solidifying her reputation as a leading scholar of food oppression. The Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History honored Ruin Their Crops for its cultural and political resonance, and national outlets have noted its incisive argumentation. Yet the legal academy has been relatively quiet — a silence that speaks volumes. The book challenges what many law professors have trained themselves to ignore: that racialized suffering is not an unintended consequence of flawed policy but often the goal of a rationalized legal regime. In Freeman’s telling, the law doesn’t merely permit waste — it sanctifies it. And the material harms of the law, particularly those denigrated as involving mere “socioeconomic rights,” deserve substantive legal inquiry.
Freeman’s historical account of crop destruction and food suppression in Indigenous and Black communities finds alarming echoes in the present. The current administration’s decision to slash funding for international sexual and reproductive health services — including access to contraception and HIV prevention — in the name of “moral clarity” is not a new kind of lawfare — it is a continuation of old ones. This book helps us name the pattern: waste as ideology, deprivation as governance. In both past and present, political spectacle becomes legal rationale, and material harm is dismissed as symbolic cost. The book demonstrates what theorist Achille Mbembe coined as “necropolitics,” “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”1
To be sure, there were moments that prompted my hesitation. Freeman’s critique of policies like milk in school lunches may strike some readers as too sweeping — and I found myself unsure whether all her conclusions about dietary policy and cultural harm were as grounded as her legal history. But that’s part of the gift: Ruin Their Crops invites the kind of discomfort that produces deeper reflection. Even when I disagreed, I found myself thinking more expansively about how legal decisions shape food access — and how urgently we need to rethink those decisions.
This book reminds us that the law is not neutral in its silences and omissions — especially when it comes to who gets to eat, what they must eat, and who must go hungry. In a legal landscape still too quick to dismiss socioeconomic rights as politics rather than justice, Freeman gives us the tools to argue otherwise. Food is not merely nutrition. It is memory, dignity, identity — and access to it is structured by the state.
We talk often in legal circles about “access to justice.” Ruin Their Crops asks what justice means if it does not include the right to eat.
- Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2019).
