About this item

Born into a poor sharecropper family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Their mother, Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman, delivered the first surviving set of identical quadruplets in America. Instant celebrities, their White doctor sold the rights to use the girls for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk Company's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy billion dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies.



About the Author

Andrea Freeman

Andrea Freeman is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mnoa William S. Richardson School of Law. Freeman writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory and issues of food policy, health, and consumer credit. She is the pioneer of the theory of "food oppression," which examines how partnerships between the government and corporations lead to racial and gender health disparities. Her work has been featured on NPR, Huffington Post, Salon, The Washington Post, The Conversation, Pacific Standard, and more.



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