This Mental Health Awareness Month, Let’s Elevate Workers’ Mental Health
In recent years, mental health awareness in the United States has been on the rise. Conversations about mental health at school, in workplaces, in social circles, around dinner tables, and in the news and mainstream media seem to be more and more normalized. Public figures have increasingly shared their personal mental health journeys on highly visible platforms. This heightened awareness is helping chip away, little by little, at long-held social stigmas around prioritizing mental health.
As promising as this is, as with most trends, the rise in mental health awareness has not included a significant group of people in our society: workers, especially food and farm workers, who do the most essential, yet undervalued work in life—keeping the world nourished and fed, stewarding humanity’s connection to our planet, and managing our natural resources.
In spite of the highly skilled and essential role that food and farm workers play, they have consistently been underpaid, disempowered, and left out of practically all conversations related to increasing wellness, care, healing, and self determination, let alone conversations about mental health.
In the United States, our legacy of colonization, enslavement, and capitalism seeded a harmful food culture that has minimized essential labor, and made both the processes and people involved in producing, preparing, distributing, and serving food nearly invisible. This dehumanization and lack of care for food and farm workers also intersects with our history of structural racism.
“Across supply chains, food system workers—and their working conditions—are often hidden as they labor in fields, on waterways, in processing facilities, and in the backs of restaurants and stores. They receive some of the lowest wages—and the most minimal health care, retirement, and paid leave benefits—of any sector of our economy… They also experience some of the highest fatal injury rates of any occupation: Commercial fishing reports the highest fatal injury rate in the country, with truck driving and agricultural labor seventh and ninth highest, respectively.
“The majority of food system workers are people of color and immigrants, and receive significantly lower wages than those working in White-dominated occupations. Food system jobs are often perceived as undesirable and have been devalued for years. Despite a long and rich history of organizing efforts among workers, jobs in the food system fail to offer economic security, adequate protections, and career mobility. Rights to organize are unprotected and participation in unions is actively discouraged. These conditions often perpetuate a state of vulnerability for workers across the food system.”
— San Diego County Food Vision 2030, Objective 4 — Elevate Wages and Working Conditions, and Improve Career Pathways
This May, as society draws attention to mental health awareness, we are calling for uprooting our harmful food culture, and elevating workers’ mental health—as well as their overall wellness and quality of life—above all.
Only when the mental health of our essential food system workers is as frequently discussed as the mental health of those who are highest-paid in society, will we be close to a place where we can say mental health is a priority in our country. Policies and programs for ensuring the wellness of workers—including not only access to mental health services and resources, but also livable wages, paid leave, healthcare benefits, worker protections, working conditions, pathways to legalization, the right to organize, and incentives for worker ownership and wealth building—must be made available.
Workers Turn to Self-Organizing and Community for Care
For generations, where systems have fallen short, workers and their families, communities, and neighbors have drawn on their own resilience to come up with self-organized solutions for care. Indigenous, Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Middle Eastern, African, Pacific Islander, and other people of color have long depended on social capital for creating culturally appropriate and accessible services that truly serve their needs and aspirations. They have exhibited the beauty and resilience of living in a way that recognizes interdependence and shares community assets.
Below are five initiatives, started by workers themselves, that have grown into organizations that advocate today for food and farm worker justice, and provide support services for mental health and other critical areas of need.
Healing Voices
Healing Voices is a mental health initiative for farmworkers created by Justice for Migrant Women. Their goal is to support mental health in farmworker communities who have experienced generations of traumatizing work conditions, economic insecurity and violence, all worsened by the pandemic. This pilot program uses the power of storytelling and technology to create a virtual space to support healing, encourage workers to know their rights, build community, and inspire change.Farmworker CARE Coalition
A program of Vista Community Clinic, San Diego’s own Farmworker CARE Coalition brings together agencies and community-based organizations dedicated to improving the living and working conditions of agricultural workers and their families in the North County region through coordination, communication, advocacy, access, research, resources, empowerment, and education.Fishermen Wellness program at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association
The Fishermen Wellness program at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association acknowledges the grueling demands and unpredictability of life as a fisherman or woman, and how this can leave individuals in this community feeling isolated and depressed. The wellness program is an ongoing series by NAMI Clinical Staff to provide resources and advocate for mental healing within the fishing communities and families.Culinary Hospitality Outreach Wellness (CHOW)
CHOW, short for Culinary Hospitality Outreach Wellness, offers both virtual and in-person meetings to support the wellness of people working in the hospitality industry. CHOW shares stories, skills, and resources that help build meaningful connections and ensure that everyone from servers to bartenders to dishwashers and chefs feel supported and heard.HEAL Food Alliance
HEAL Food Alliance is a national multi-sector, multi-racial coalition of organizations, representing rural and urban farmers, ranchers, fishers, farm and food chain workers, indigenous groups, and more. Together, these groups are building a movement to transform our food and farm systems from the current extractive economic model towards community control, care for the land, local economies, meaningful labor, and healthful communities nationwide, while supporting the sovereignty of all living beings.
Much can be learned about resilience by following the lead of these worker-organizers, and by expanding their efforts to ensure their communities’ security, health, and wellness.
Mental Health, Justice, and Transforming Our Food System
Like discussions about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI), discussions about mental health cannot simply take place to bandwagon or box-check. These conversations must not end with mere awareness, nor solutions accessible by only the wealthiest and most powerful in society.
Ultimately, these discussions must shift us toward rethinking our culture—to be rooted not in extraction, but in a deep recognition of our interdependence, and a reconfiguration of our systems to share the wealth and abundance of the world. Building a society that truly values the health and wellness (both mental and physical) of every human being, including those who do the essential work of feeding and nourishing people and planet, is the only way forward.
“Imagine a future where the ways we grow, cook, and gather around food affirms our relationships to the places we live, to the people who came before us, and to future generations. Imagine a future where we recognize care as the essence of all labor and appreciate all people’s labor, no matter the form it takes. Imagine that we joyfully nourish each other, that we all know we belong, and that we recognize land as kin. What images come to mind? What longing is sparked in us?”
— Jovida Ross, Shizue Roche Adachiand, and Julie Quiroz, “Rethinking Food Culture Might Save Us,” Nonprofit Quarterly
At its core, this is the goal of San Diego County Food Vision 2030 and of the Alliance. When we change the way we grow food, move food, share food, and think about food, we ultimately change the way we treat the planet, ourselves, and each other.