Health + Nutrition 

An industry that often celebrates pushing through the pain is turning its focus to mental health.

When employees clock into work at Mulvaneys B&L, a popular farm-to-table restaurant in Sacramento, California, they’re encouraged to slip one of four color-coded cards into a cardboard box. The cards have faces on them: one is happy, one is angry, one is neutral and one is stressed (in restaurant parlance, that’s “in the weeds.”)

“It’s like the pain signs at hospitals,” explains co-owner Patrick Mulvaney. Though the cards are anonymous, they give employees a chance to assess their own moods and share them with the manager or the peer helper on duty. During the staff’s pre-service meeting, the manager can share how many angry or stressed employees there are that day and ask if anyone needs additional support, empathy, or patience.

On a recent Saturday night in September, Mildred Braxton did something she never thought she’d do: she taught 20 or so others how to make succotash and steamed collard greens over Zoom.

With the confidence of a Food Network chef, Braxton, a parent of five and grandmother of three, put a skillet on the burner, poured some oil into the pan, and let it heat up before throwing in some chopped onion, frozen corn, frozen lima beans (called butter beans in the South), and black-eyed peas, narrating all the while. After covering the pan and letting it all heat up, she added stewed tomatoes, okra, and seasonings.

“Okra is the last vegetable I put in because it’s easy for it to fall apart,” said Braxton, who hails from Mississippi. “Okra has a bad rap. I’m standing up for okra!”

Santiago Garza Martinez, now 47, was a young man when he started working for Anne Amie Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1999. He began as an equipment operator, and today, 21 years later, he’s the field manager, overseeing a crew of 38 vineyard workers, all but eight of whom are seasonal employees. They weed, plant vines, and pick Pinot Noir grapes for Anne Amie’s acclaimed bottles. And like many seasonal farmworkers, their access to health care is precarious at best.

“The majority of the farmworkers in my crew don’t have primary care physicians,” Garza Martinez says. Even if they did, paying for the care would be a challenge for many of them. There are 2.5 to 3 million farmworkers in the United States, and many lack access to health insurance, according to Silvia Partida, CEO of the Texas-based National Center for Farmworker Health.