The Country in the City, Then and Now. Italian farmers in the Bay Area

Feathery stalks of wild fennel have shot up along public fence lines and in vacant lots throughout the bay area.  Easy to miss alongside the showier riot of cherries, tulips, and poppies that also blossom and bloom this time of year, the pale green fennel is nonetheless our locally distinctive, if more humble, flag of spring.  Like all flags, it has a history.  An Italian history at that. 

 

Among the largest group of early Italian settlers in California were farmers from Liguria, skilled in cultivating fruits, flowers, and vegetables in the coastal valleys of their home province. Another, smaller group of Italian immigrants to the bay area came from Lucca, in nearby Tuscany.  Attracted by the Gold Rush of 1849, but often failing to strike gold in the rivers and mines, many returned to San Francisco and the trades and skills they knew from their homeland. 

 

The built-up areas of San Francisco in the 1850s and ‘60s huddled close to the northeast waterfront around Yerba Buena cove, between today’s Market Street, financial district, Chinatown, and lower North Beach.  The rest of the city was mostly an expanse of empty, unclaimed land – windswept dunes to the west, barren hills and sandy valleys in the east and center.  It was on these empty lands, especially on the sunnier, eastern side of the peninsula, south of Market Street, that Ligurian and Luccan farmers established small truck gardens, or ranci  (the Italian plural adaptation of Spanish rancho, reflecting the strong Mexican presence in the area).

Hayes Valley, where Civic Center is today, was one of the first areas to come under cultivation by Italian farmers.  With the addition of compost and manure, and regular irrigation, the sandy soils proved to be remarkably fertile.   By the 1860s every valley from south of Market to San Bruno was filled with small truck farms feeding the appetites of a booming city.  

 

And what appetites they became!  Starting with radishes, spinach, and lettuce, quick-growing items found across many culinary traditions, the Italian farmers then introduced specialty crops from the Italian kitchen – broccoli, eggplant, cardoon, artichokes, sweet basil, and the pear shaped tomato.  And yes, fennel, the Florence fennel or finocchio, cultivated especially by the farmers from Lucca. 

 

San Francisco restaurants, chefs, and home cooks embraced the new ingredients, making vegetables a distinctive feature of a San Francisco cuisine that, from these early days, would stand out from standard American fare.  As celebrated San Francisco chef and food writer Joyce Goldstein tells it, the bond between farmers and chefs continues to be a strong shaping force for the innovation and freshness associated with the bay area’s and California’s distinctive gastronomy, in all of its new and myriad variants. 

 

Today, the specialty ingredients have expanded to include Asian and Latin American items. But Italian vegetables continue to figure prominently on the list of chefs’ favorites.  Goldstein mentions radicchio, romanesco broccoli, squash blossoms, stridoli, and tennerumi di cucuzi, to name just a few of the ingredients appearing on the menus of the city’s top restaurants these days. 

 

No longer are the truck farmers supplying San Francisco markets mostly Italian.  And regular commercial farms have long since disappeared from within the city limits, driven out by prohibitively high land values. But a small-scale urban agriculture of a new kind is increasingly alive and well in San Francisco.  

 

In response to resident demand, the city has made public lands available for community gardens, which have been established all over the city in growing numbers in the last 10 years.  A recently passed city ordinance gives urban farmers, who are mostly part-time agriculturalists, the right to sell the produce of their small plots.  

 

And a new California law, the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act, in effect since January of this year, provides tax incentives to private property owners who allow agriculture to take place on their land.  Like finocchio, a once distinctively Italian cultivar since gone wild and become a part of the bay area landscape we all share, the small garden is becoming everywhere and for all, making a bounty from sand, fog, and compost, and heralding spring.