If you’ve ever streamed the wildly popular show, The Bear, you might have an inkling of why the food and hospitality industry is so stressful.
In a 2017 study, the nonprofit Mental Health America released a study of 19 industries, and the food and beverage industry reported one of the highest levels of mental health issues. In 2015, the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) ranked the restaurant industry as the highest in heavy alcohol consumption.
And restaurant workers say it hasn’t gotten any better since Covid. An October 2023 Charleston City Paper story looked at the stresses of chef life, with local chefs chiming in about the side effects of working in such a demanding industry.
“There’s a lot of trauma reported with people in this industry,” said Catarina Bill, chief mission officer for the Southern Smoke Foundation, which provides emergency funds for food and beverage workers. “A lot of people are still dealing with the post-trauma of the pandemic and what they experienced through that time. The industry is hard for a lot of reasons.
Expectations are very high, execution is the most important. There is no room for mistakes and that puts a lot of pressure on people.”
Southern Smoke was founded in Houston in 2015 as a fundraiser for a sommelier diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, and expanded nationwide to provide emergency relief in 2017. This year, it took over Pay it Forward, which was created by local restaurateur Michael Shemtov to help food and beverage workers financially strapped because of Covid. Pay it Forward was folded into Southern Smoke when the foundation moved into Charleston earlier this year.
The foundation, which also serves Columbia, has provided $81,920 to South Carolina this year so far, including $44,920 in Charleston alone.
“The top three emergency needs, month over month, are rent or mortgage, medical bills and utilities,” Bill said. “We were providing relief in natural disasters, but it seems that natural disasters are year round now. We do emergency relief in every state, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico.”
Southern Smoke has expanded its mission from just emergency relief to mental health in a program called Behind You, named, to echo the warning kitchen workers give when crossing behind another worker. By the end of the year, Behind You will be in Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, California, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Virginia, Tennessee, the District of Columbia and South Carolina.
The organization’s model is to partner with accredited schools of psychology, psychiatry or social work, and to take advantage of the clinical hours those students must perform. Southern Smoke provides money for clinics and students provide mental health services. The students are graduate level or above, the clinical hours are supervised, and the client gets either 20 sessions or six months of counseling, whichever comes first, at no cost.
Bill stressed that the services are confidential: No one in someone’s workplace ever needs to know that someone has sought help.
Southern Smoke receives its money from grants and donations, as well as fundraisers such as the annual Houston Southern Smoke Festival, which gave the foundation its name.
The eventual goal is for Behind You to be in every state, but the organization is proceeding with caution to ensure the partnerships are sustainable.
“The worst thing would be to start up somewhere and then have to pull out,” Bill said.
In South Carolina, the foundation is partnered with the University of South Carolina and hopes to expand to other universities. Applications from Charleston workers are being accepted this month, and Bill said they were already receiving applications from people who have heard about them.
“The Bear is a great example of the stress in this work,” Bill said. “But we want to be the reason people don’t have to go into the cooler and scream anymore.”
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