Andrea Freeman's "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground"

Andrea Freeman, a pioneer in the field of food politics, is a professor at Southwestern Law School. A Fulbright scholar and author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Freeman has published and appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, The Takeaway, Here & Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Black Agenda Report, and more. She lives in Los Angeles.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground comes near the beginning of the chapter titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk. It describes the government’s struggle to store the big orange blocks of American cheese that the USDA had to buy because of subsidies in the Farm Bill that support dairy farmers. The USDA filled all the cold storages in the U.S. with cheese then rented a half-acre cave in Kansas and piled cheese blocks from floor to ceiling. But it still had too much cheese on its hands. The agency created a public-school milk program to try to get rid of some of the unwanted beverage. As the school milk program grew over the decades, public school students became less and less white.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book. This page introduces the reader to different ways the government has approached the challenge of supporting an industry whose product is undesirable to most of the population because they experience lactose intolerance or other harmful effects of consuming milk. The last sentence foreshadows the link between dairy policy and racism.

If page 99 piques the reader’s interest, they can continue reading the chapter to discover the different ways that milk and white supremacy have interacted over time. They will meet USDA milk marketing superstar White Gold, a fabulous rock opera star who reminds his Black back-up singers The Calcium Twins how he told them that milk would make their time of the month – a ride down the red river – easier for them and him. They will learn that public school students who want an alternative to cow’s milk have to go to a doctor for a diagnosis that they have a disability. This rule helps dispose of a subsidized commodity by giving it to people who get sick from it - just to boost corporate profits.

Learn more about Ruin Their Crops on the Ground at the Metropolitan Books website.

The Page 99 Test: Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice.

--Marshal Zeringue