At Ferry Plaza, follow the food back
A jar of miso, a named variety of fruit, a dumpling made through shared work. Follow the growers and kitchens that make a Ferry Plaza morning worth knowing.
Archive · 2022Mariko Grady did not set out to make a farmers-market business. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, she began selling homemade miso to raise money for relief. Demand brought another problem to solve: larger-scale selling needed a commercial kitchen. She entered La Cocina’s incubator, and the work gradually became Aedan Fermented Foods.
That story changes the way to approach San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. A jar is a food, but it is also a set of decisions about ingredients, production and how a small business finds a public. Ask what brought one thing to the stall and a morning’s shopping starts to draw a map.
The map reaches across California farmland, through kitchens in the city and outward to other places. Come for breakfast or a bag of fruit, and leave with a better sense of the work behind it.
