“What in the world do you do with stinging nettles?” a young woman in a red pullover and black jeans asks, gingerly holding a bunch of dangerous-looking greens between thumb and forefinger. The question fazes no one.

“Just sauté them in olive oil with a little garlic and a few red pepper flakes,” offers a fellow shopper browsing at this crowded outdoor market stall. “They’re wonderful.”

“Or simmer them up into a soup,” another says. “I’ve even put them in vegetarian lasagna. Just be careful of the nettles.”

It’s nine-thirty in the morning. Fog still shrouds the city. But the stalls of San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market are humming with activity. Shoppers clutch cups of hot coffee and browse through bins overflowing with the season’s bounty: plump tomatoes, fat round pears, fresh garlic, figs, cucumbers and opulent heads of cauliflower.

A tasty destination anywhere you travel

The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is just one of an estimated 4,000 farmers markets operating around the country–from the Union Square Greenmarket in the heart of Manhattan to Kapiolani Community College Farmers Market in Honolulu, Hawaii. All of them celebrate the bounty of regional farms and the virtues of buying local produce. Farmers markets everywhere reflect the unique character of the places they call home, from the wild mushrooms and smoked Pacific salmon on sale at the Portland Farmers Market to pine nuts and hot chili peppers hawked at the Austin Farmers Market in Texas. The best of them help preserve local farms and support sustainable agricultural practices designed to keep soil fertile and water uncontaminated.

Wherever you travel, it’s worth checking out the local farmers market, not only to cast your vote for a vital local agriculture but to get a grassroots sense of the place and its people.

Our favorite farmers market

Of course we think the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco is something special. Arrayed on three sides of the newly-restored ferry building, the market looks out on sweeping views of the Bay Bridge as it arches across white-capped waters to Yerba Buena Island and then on to Berkeley and Oakland. Where an ill-planned and unsightly elevated highway once stood, a wide boulevard lined with palm trees now stretches along the embarcadero in front of the ferry building. With an estimated 30,000 people crowding into the market on a busy Saturday, locals use the statue of Gandhi that presides over the plaza as a meeting place—a perfect emblem for a city once synonymous with peace and love. These days, though, hippies have given way to foodies, and the Ferry Plaza market has become their Mecca.

When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck, halting the World Series, toppling houses and collapsing highways and sections of the Bay Bridge, an elevated highway in front of the ferry building sustained extensive damage. At exactly 5:04, the moment the quake shattered the city’s peace, the clock in the ferry building’s prominent tower stopped. For almost a decade it remained frozen at that time while the ferry building underwent repairs–an unsettling reminder of the city’s precarious perch not far from the San Andreas fault. Now the clock keeps time again, presiding over the restored ferry building and the transformed neighborhood around it, a symbol of the city’s indomitable resilience.

History, physical beauty, and renewed urban spirit come together to make the setting special by any measure. The Bay Area may embraces an agricultural region of unparalleled diversity, blessed with a mild Mediterranean climate that allows local farmers to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to market all year round. Within a radius of 150 miles, a remarkable range of microclimates favors almost everything under the sun. To the east and south lie the sun-struck fields of the Central Valley, famous for artichokes, garlic, nuts, and a cornucopia of other produce. Up north, cows and goats graze the rolling pasturelands of Marin. Mild ocean breezes there create cool conditions ideal for raising leafy green vegetables and pinot noir grapes. Nearby Tomales Bay produces some of the most succulent oysters around, while the fishermen of Bodega Bay, a little farther north, haul in generous harvests of Dungeness crab and salmon. Inland, the valleys of Sonoma, Napa, and Sacramento enjoy hot summer days and cool nights, the ideal conditions for growing some of the world’s finest grapes, as well as tomatoes, squash, kale, beans, peas, cauliflower, apples, pears, and figs.

Why farmers markets matter

Special? You bet. But there’s something special at almost any farmers market, anywhere in the country. Many of the country’s leading food writers and top nutritionists urge shoppers to leave the grocery store and head to the farmers market whenever they can. Why?

Freshness, taste and variety, for starters. At most farmers markets, growers pick their produce the afternoon before they sell it, making it far fresher than most anything on sale at large grocery stores, with their long distribution chains. Truly fresh produce tastes better and stays fresher longer, the experts say. It may also pack more nutrition, some studies show. Farmers markets typically feature heirloom varieties—cultivars of tomatoes, potatoes, apples, pears and other produce that were developed to suit growing conditions in specific regions. A century ago, more than a hundred different apples and nearly as many varieties of tomatoes grew around the US. Many of these heirloom varieties all but disappeared from markets as large-scale farmers settled on two or three varieties that had the virtues of being easy to grow and ship. Small farmers, because they sell locally, don’t have to worry about shipability. They can choose varieties that look and taste terrific—the virtues that really matter when you’re selecting food.

Loyal customers at farmers markets are willing to pay a little extra for an extraordinarily ripe and flavorful tomato or head of lettuce. That, in turn, makes it possible for small farmers to experiment not only with growing unusual varieties but also with innovative techniques for organic and sustainable agriculture. Spend a few hours kibitzing among the stalls and you’re certain to overhear growers comparing notes on techniques they’ve tried in order to keep snails from devouring their lettuces or aphids from spoiling their pears or tomatoes. In many areas, growers have gone beyond official organic standards to embrace biodynamic and other farming methods that attempt to create self-sustaining ecosystems, using as little energy as possible and recycling virtually everything on the farm.

“Sustainable agriculture isn’t just a sideline here. It’s the reason this market exists,” says Christine Farren, events director for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, which hosts the Ferry Plaza market. “We’re here to encourage a greater understanding of how food is produced, to help foster a connection between farm and market and table.”

Indeed, farmers markets like this one keep many small farms in business.

“If it weren’t for the customers at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, we wouldn’t exist,” says Brandon Ross, of Ella Bella Farms, one of the most popular vendors at the Ferry Plaza market. He can sell wholesale quantities of the farm’s produce here at retail prices, making 80 cents on the dollar rather than the 20 cents he would might earn selling to grocery chains. What’s more, his customers—including chefs from top-tier restaurants like Chez Panisse, Rubicon, Zuni Café, Greens, Hayes Street Grill and Boulevard—come to him every Saturday and Tuesday, sparing him the expense of time and trouble to make individual deliveries. “That means we can spend more of our time farming and keep our costs down.

And because the market goes year-round, we can offer our workers a steady job at good pay.” That matters deeply to a man whose deep roots in Bay Area agriculture tap both a heritage of political activism and a strong environmental ethic. Ross’s grandfather was a labor organizer and mentor to Cesar Chavez, who started the Farm Workers Union. Ross himself studied sustainable agriculture at the University of California. “I went into farming to meld those two worlds, to give farm workers a fair wage and a healthy working environment, and to protect the soil and land and the heritage of small farms like ours,” he says. “We couldn’t do that without the Ferry Plaza market.”

Tags: CUESA, farmers markets, Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, local, organic, sustainable agriculture