Food is politics, and politics is food. In this week’s episode Matt and Kelly talk with Andrea Freeman about her 2024 book Ruin their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food, in the United States, from the trail of tears to school lunch, which was published by Macmillan.

Andrea’s study makes the argument that food policy and laws in the US have created and maintained racial and social inequality. Using history to understand this ‘food oppression’.

Andrea Freeman works at the Southwestern Law School Lost Angeles and you can learn more about her on her profile page.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

Widely available in nature, berries are of such significance to Northern and Eastern Europeans and have become essential foods across the world. Berries are more than what you think they are; bananas are berries for example! In today's discussion with Heather Arndt Anderson we learn about the historical use of berries, our attempts to make artificial versions, and what might happen to berries in the future.

Heather Arndt Anderson published Berries: A Global History with Reaktion Books in 2018. You can find out more about her at her Instagram page and at Superabundant.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

Vanilla has become a slightly more expensive condiment in our lives, but for a long time it was simply impossible to grow outside of its native Mexico. In this episode we explore the history of Vanilla, how it was propagated, and its use in various foods. We look at the connection to slavery and its artificial version vanillin.

We are joined by Rosa Abreu-Runkel who, in 2020, published Vanilla: A Global History with Reaktion Books.

To find out more about Rosa's work check out her profile on the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) website.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.