Professor Andrea Freeman has won two major national honors for her latest book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, From the Trail of Tears to School Lunches. The book recently won the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and the 2025 James Beard Media Award in the Food Issues and Advocacy category, recognizing Freeman’s groundbreaking analysis of how U.S. food law has been used to uphold racial and social inequality from colonization to the present. 

In the book, Freeman traces how food law and policy have long served as instruments of control. From the colonial era to the modern day, she shows how decisions about what people eat—or are allowed to eat—have reinforced systems of racial, economic, and political dominance. “When George Washington ordered his troops to ruin Indigenous peoples’ crops in the ground and stop them planting more,” she explains, “he was continuing colonists’ use of food to try to subordinate Indigenous nations, steal their land, and destroy their way of life. Unfortunately, echoes of these practices persist in modern U.S. food law and policy.” 

Freeman coined the term “food oppression” to describe this dynamic. Drawing on over fifteen years of research, she connects the destruction of Indigenous foodways to contemporary issues like school lunch programs, surplus commodity distribution, and corporate influence over nutrition guidelines. 

The Los Angeles Times Book Prize was presented on April 25 at USC’s Bovard Auditorium during the 45th annual awards ceremony. The James Beard Media Award was announced shortly after, on June 14 in Chicago, during a ceremony presented by Capital One that honored the nation’s top food authors, broadcast producers, journalists, podcasters, and digital creators. 

A leading figure in the fields of food law and racial justice, Freeman holds the Second Century Chair at Southwestern Law School, where she teaches Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Food Law and Policy. Her previous book, Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, is currently in development as a documentary with Topic Pictures. 

Reflecting on the broader implications of her work, Freeman emphasizes that food has never been just about sustenance—it has always been shaped by the forces of law, identity, and power. “I hope that the book shows how food has been an integral part of our history, from colonization to enslavement and up to today’s assimilation of immigrants.”