No, Schlosser is right, it’s not only about food—it’s about way more than that. But there is more to food than just food and as Holt-Gimenez says, the community food movement is inadvertently and inevitably opening the public sphere. But, as Holt-Gimenez goes on to say, the public sphere will not be returned to the public until structural injustices are discussed and brought to, for lack of a better word, justice.

Race has everything to do with this. Race has everything to do with the politics, history, current condition and future of our country and the world. If we needed a more shocking and irrefutable reminder of this, we got one in North Carolina. If we don’t take down the Confederate flag, if white privilege continues to go undiscussed and uncontested, there is no hope for food sovereignty, food justice or any iteration of our national or global food movements.

We are what we eat. This is what proponents of the food movement urge so strongly. Eat something better and we will be better for it. This is true. The fact remains that we must acknowledge that we eat what we are. As long as our politics, economics, justice system and national psyche is racist, so will be our food. These changes are not individual but systematic.

White people have the opportunity to use their individual privilege to buy themselves out of the structural issues of our food society. Buying organic carrots will usually help. So will growing your own. Your CSA share, fair-trade coffee and grass-fed beef will absolve you of any direct sin with respect to food, but the sin is complicit, it is original, born out of you and the system you exist in.

Eat the apple, escape from Lappé’s productivist garden of passive ignorance and complicity, acknowledge privilege and encounter race honestly. This is what white people must do to change the issues that plague our society’s poor, gerrymandered and profiled. Minority voices are angry and passionate because they are marginalized. The only thing white privilege has to fear is white privilege itself. This is what Anthea Butler urged us on Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” today. Until white people decide to take action on their own privilege, more churches and innocent people will be shot, without justice.

This has everything to do with food.