The super juicy and sweet Santa Rosa plum, a disappearing icon of pre-Silicon Valley Santa Rosa Valley.

The Silicon Valley we know today was very different before Atari moved in as one of the first tech companies in 1972 in Sunnydale, California. The area was largely agricultural, filled with orchards of pitted fruits of cherries, apricots and plums. About 80% of the orchards were for plums that were made into California prunes. Before it was Silicon Valley, it was called the Valley of Heart’s Delight, because of all of its flowering fruit trees

A flowering plum orchard in Silicon Valley when it was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delights.

There was good reason for so many orchards. The Santa Clara Valley has an advantage over other fruit-growing regions because of its geography, tucked away from the coast, but not too far from it. It has warmth, but it also has mildness, especially at night. After a hot day, fruit trees need to rest. A lot of times in the Central Valley, where most pitted fruits for the American market are now grown, it’ll go up to 100 degrees during the day and go down to about 85 at night. In the Santa Clara Valley, the day temperatures are cooler and the night temperatures are cooler, too. That means the fruit can stay on the tree longer, and the longer the fruit stays on the trees, the more sugar it develops. The flesh is firmer, and juicier. “Tree-ripened,” as it turns out, is not just an advertising slogan. Delicious varieties of plums, like the small Santa Rosa plum, and the Japanese variety Blenheim apricot became the fruit the Valley became known for worldwide

Until Atari came to the Santa Rosa Valley, it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries. Del Monte and Sunsweet are two brands which originated in the Valley. Various fruit cooperatives were formed in the area to deal with economic issues, including The California Fruit Union (founded in 1883) and the Santa Clara County Fruit Exchange (founded in 1892). Water was supplied from an artesan aquifer and when the water table dropped, wells were pumped. Many orchards were small with housing and fruit growing in a dispersed pattern. By the 1920s and 1930s, the agricultural and horticultural industries were doing well in the valley and included 18 canneries, 13 dried-fruit packing houses, and 12 fresh-fruit and vegetable shipping firms, and they were shipping internationally. But that all stopped when land became more valuable for development with the tech boom.

The need for workers greatly exceeded the local population and in the nineteenth century, Chinese and Japanese immigrants met that need. Toward the end of the nineteenth century many Italians and other immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe came to the valley and worked in the orchards and canneries. During the 20th century there were Filipino immigrants. Mexicans became the dominant agricultural workforce through the Bracero Program (1942-1964) which was a bi-national effort that brought Mexican guest workers, known as braceros, to fill in agricultural labor shortages caused by World War II. It was these Braceros who are responsible for popularizing the burrito in Mexican American cuisine, because this is what they were fed at the end of their day. With no Bracero program, there would be no Chipotle.

Tasty though they are, though, these delicate Santa Rosa fruits are expensive. They bruise easily, and need to be sold and consumed right away. As fruit farms were displaced by Tech Firms, they had to move from the Santa Clara Valley to the Central Valley. The fruit varieties had to be more heat tolerant and more prolific than the delicate, sweet, smaller fruits that could survive in the Santa Clara Valley. From an economic perspective, the Central Valley to the north wins on every score, not just because the land is cheaper.

That means most of the varieties you see in the markets today are ones that do well in the Central Valley’s heat. So the Blenheim apricot, for example, a delicate creature that thrived for decades in the temperate Santa Clara Valley, has given way to the heartier, blander Patterson. Although they’re not as sweet and delicious, they are durable, and productive, yielding 20 tons to the acre versus the ten you get with the Blenheim apricot.

The tech boom began by Atari in 1972 and fueled in the 80s caused the area’s many small orchards to give way to drive-throughs and strip malls amid campuses housing titans of high-tech industry: Lockheed Martin, Yahoo!, Juniper Networks, LinkedIn.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari in Sunnyvale, California.

Nolan Bushnell, who some refer to as the Godfather of video games, created Atari in 1972, the first silicon valley company in Sunnyvale. He and his co-founders were in their 20s and wanted to create an “Age of Aquarius” company where the work ethic was work hard play hard – paving the way for the ethos of Silicon valley and creating the template for tech companies that came in and displaced the many fruit farms. They recruited folks saying they could wear whatever they wanted, come in to work whenever they wanted, do whatever they wanted, as long as their output was good. Bushnell said he could get any engineer in the valley with this explanation. There were lots of tales of board meetings in hot tubs, pot smoking in the hallways, and lots of hooking up. And they made a lot of money – They built their empire by making hit arcade games like Asteroids and Defender, industry defining game consoles and computers

One of their first games, Pong inspired Tomohiro Nishkado in Japan to create the iconic game Space Invaders. His characters of alien crabs, octopuses and squid were also inspired not by sushi, but by War of the Worlds. Atari licensed Pacman, created by another Japanese game designer, Toru Iwatani, after seeing the shape a pizza made when he took the first slice.

Many residents of the area still have fruit trees in their backyards, and a common one is the plum. These are often the Santa Rosa or the native varieties that grow wild in the area.

One of the last Silicon Valley orchards is at Orchard Heritage Park in Sunnyvale, California. It has been owned by three generations of the Olson family since 1899. Like many of the other orchard families, they lease the original orchard land to a strip mall in Sunnyvale.

Olson said that the market for dried apricots is narrow, especially for the Blenheim apricots that the orchard grows. Olson claims that Blenheim apricots are the sweetest and “best tasting” apricots, but are going extinct as they are the most tedious to care for — it costs around seven dollars to raise one pound of apricots. As a result, most apricots in the United States are imported from the Middle East. Olson said less than 700 tons of apricots were grown in-state last year. Especially with families on budgets, you can get cheap dried apricots from Turkey at Costco in big bags and small farms like Olson’s family just can’t do that

Urbanization and shelf life stability is a common story in the ruining of our once tastier and more delicious American produce. If we just valued our food supply chains more – which we’ve certainly seen the affects of in this Pandemic – maybe we’d have healthier and tastier foods. Little did I know the fun games I played on my Atari 2600 as a kid caused our pitted fruits to taste like cardboard.