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Abstract 

Skimmed tells the story of the first recorded identical Black quadruplets, born in 1946 to Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman married to a tenant farmer in North Carolina who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood. Annie Mae's white doctor named the sisters after his relatives then auctioned off the rights to use them in marketing materials to the highest bidding formula company. The girls lived their entire lives in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. Jumping off from the Fultz sisters' story, Skimmed analyzes why Black women in the U.S. have the lowest rates of breastfeeding. It explores how legal, political, and societal factors lead to 'first food' oppression.

The speaker

Andrea Freeman is a Professor of Law at the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law and is Fulbright King's College London Research Scholar studying food inequality in the UK beginning on March 1. She writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. She is the author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice and Ruin Their Crops on the Ground, forthcoming in 2023. She has also published over a dozen book chapters and law review articles, many of them exploring her pioneering theory of food oppression. 

The series

This social reproduction seminar series is part of the Laws of Social Reproduction project led by Prof. Prabha Kotiswaran, and based at King's College London and IWWAGE Delhi. For more information about the project or to join the network, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk. The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946)

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