The Salad Bowl and the Refrigerated Railcar

The phrase Salad Bowl of the World is painted on a mural along the highway approaching Salinas, and it has the ring of boosterism. It is also, by any measure, accurate.

Before the Salinas Valley became the Salad Bowl of the World, it was a grain valley, then a dairy valley, then a sugar-beet valley. The sugar beets came first in the eighteen nineties when Claus Spreckels, a German-born San Francisco sugar refining baron, built what was at the time the largest sugar beet factory in the United States a few miles south of Salinas. That factory, which opened in February of eighteen ninety-nine, anchored the Spreckels Sugar Company for decades and put the valley on the national agricultural map.

Lettuce came after that, and it transformed everything. The key was not the plant itself but a piece of technology: the refrigerated railcar. In the nineteenth century, fresh vegetables could only be sold within a day's travel of the farm. The refrigerated railcar, which kept temperatures near freezing throughout a multi-day transcontinental journey, made it possible to grow in one place and eat three thousand miles away.

California growers in the Salinas Valley began scaling iceberg lettuce cultivation in the early twentieth century. The variety had been introduced by the Burpee seed company in eighteen ninety-four and was prized because its compact, dense head could withstand the rigors of transcontinental rail shipping in a way that more delicate leaf varieties could not. By the nineteen twenties and thirties the valley was shipping millions of crates of lettuce east annually. In nineteen sixty-three, local growers and shippers celebrated sending the one millionth railroad car of iceberg lettuce across the country. By that point Salinas was accounting for roughly fifty percent of America's entire national lettuce production.

Today the valley's output includes not just lettuce but broccoli, celery, artichokes, spinach, and strawberries, and the Monterey County Farm Bureau estimates that the single county of Monterey grows more than half the country's supply of several major vegetable categories. The fog that rolls in off the Pacific every morning and cools the fields is not an inconvenience; it is the agronomic engine that makes this scale of production possible. The coastal temperatures keep produce from bolting, extend the growing season, and produce the mild climate that allows three to four crop rotations per year.

The mural is accurate. The economics behind it are more complicated, as the next few stories will make clear.