I come from old-fashioned Mexican hillbilly stock: people who, for generations, measured their lives against the Catholic sacraments, who made their own shepherd’s cheese, slaughtered their own chickens, sewed all their own clothes and shaped their days around the holy trinity of family, work and church. My mother’s family left the rolling hillsides of west-central Mexico and settled permanently in southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, where their foothold into American society was the region’s farms, fields, groves, packing houses and meatpacking plants. They told stories of everything they saw and endured: sadistic managers, near-death encounters with sharp-edged machinery, terrifying drops off industrial ladders, untreated injuries that festered into wounds and the general despair of turning your body into an instrument of somebody else’s wealth.

I hoped things would be better for workers in the 21st century. But time and again, the food workers I interview describe conditions not far removed from my parent’s reality. If you want to see where America’s racial hierarchy finds its crudest expression—where workers of color disproportionately die avoidable deaths—it is on the ground level of our food production systems. The work remains among the most dangerous and punishing in the country. Meat and poultry workers—the bulk of whom are people of color, including a large percentage of immigrants and refugees from Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—receive treatment for serious injuries (including the loss of body parts) at an average rate of twice per week in the United States. They earn about $14 an hour.

Last spring, the coronavirus crisis made this work even more dangerous. Meatpackers, migrant farm laborers and other food workers across the country reported a lack of company-provided) face masks, cramped working conditions and, insidiously, employers who failed to provide information about possible coronavirus contamination at worksites. (The chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court notably blamed immigrant workers’ living conditions, because such outbreaks could not be generated by “regular folks”).

Despite the amount of media attention paid to high infection rates in New York City and Los Angeles, the biggest Covid infection hotspot in the country last April was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, home to Smithfield Foods, an enormous pork plant that pumps out products 24 hours a day. More than 500 plant workers tested positive for coronavirus last spring, a number that amounted to 44 percent of all the cases in South Dakota at the time. At least four workers died.

The pandemic also pushed into plain view the racial hierarchies that govern the restaurant industry. The starkest racial divide in American food culture is the industry’s partitioning of back-of-house kitchen staff and front-of-house positions, a setup that generally reinforces historic inequities among workers. The racial hierarchies in American restaurants is woefully under-examined, although one oft-cited 2015 study from the Restaurant Opportunities Center and U.C. Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center looked at 133 fine-dining restaurants in California and found that workers of color received 56 percent lower earnings compared to equally qualified white workers.

Although the dismantling of culinary figureheads who enforce these racial hierarchies is an important aspect of addressing equity in the food industry, the most endemic form of racism in American food culture is the dearth of fresh, quality, affordable food, and culturally appropriate markets and venues in neighborhoods that have been historically redlined and choked off from government resources and corporate investment. These are the “food deserts” that activist Karen Washington has renamed food apartheid, a term aimed at the underlying conditions that sprout inequities in the first place.

One persuasive reason for enlisting more diverse voices in American food media is to broaden the national conversation around food, to make it richer and to confront its various complicated problems—such as food apartheid—from the perspective of people who understand what it means to grow up on a block with multiple fast food restaurants but not a single place to buy fresh strawberries.

The American Food Media Complex, the historically white institutions that help shape American popular food culture, are stubbornly elitist and white, and rooted in the idea that white chefs and writers are natural guides to the culinary world. Chefs and writers of color, meanwhile, are treated like appendages or colorful embroidery, cultural specialists used to give access or credibility to others.

In the summer of 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, and a swell of national and global consciousness around racial justice and police violence, Bon Appétit editor in chief Adam Rapoport resigned after writer Tammie Teclemariam tweeted an old Halloween picture of him in brownface. It’s important to note that the resignation of powerful, white, outwardly liberal gatekeepers like Rapoport is rarely a product of institutional soul-searching. In my experience, the push for equity and inclusiveness in establishment food media is spearheaded by people of color, who, not coincidentally, are often the least equipped to make change. White leaders and colleagues must understand that it is everybody’s job to talk about race, diversity and inclusion, and not only a task for Black and brown journalists. Our presence in the glass-walled conference rooms of corporate America is fragile, freighted with expectation and responsibility, and subject to subtle (and not-so-subtle) acts of exclusion.

Last November, when I published a series of tweets about attempts to achieve pay equity, I was astonished by the level of support I received from around the world. A journalist from the BBC wrote to tell me I was not alone. Nora López, the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, published an open letter, calling on my employer to not devalue the work of Latinx journalists, because doing so endorses the idea that our contributions are less worthy, and that we are not worthy. I did not receive support from my employer though: In a very public response, they cited my purported lack of work experience and paucity of national journalism awards. The statement shamed and humiliated me, a not-so-subtle reminder of my place on the racial pecking order. It launched me into the kind of depression that made it difficult to eat and sleep.

We must prevent these harms and inequities in the first place. My “situation” underscores a desperate need for publishers, editors and allies invested in racial equity. I’m not sure legacy publications can lead the way. We need to sustain a new generation of independent food media: I cannot recommend highly enough Stephen Satterfield and Melissa Shi’s Whetstone, LinYee Yuan’s thought-provoking Mold and Klancy Miller’s evocative For the Culture, a magazine celebrating Black women in food and wine.

It is easy to rhapsodize about the power of food to cultivate pleasure, identity and community. Most of us who write about food are bewitched by its ability to collapse time and space in one or two bites. We are good at using food as a lens when we like what we’re going to see. It is hard and uncomfortable but absolutely necessary to talk about the junctures where food and race in America intersect in dehumanizing and violent ways.

We should begin by recognizing that American food culture, and its various economies, is rooted in slave labor and sustained over time by a system of power that makes inequities appear normal, ordinary and correct. Let’s acknowledge that we’re still seated at separate tables, in separate rooms, in separate halves of a divided country.