In his endless mantra, a hotdog vendor captured the primal nature of food in Italian culture: "Che mangia muore mai"--"he who eats never dies." Food became a major means of economic survival and an important impetus for commercial creations in the Italian neighborhoods on Chicago's North and Near West Sides. [70]

A desire to hold on to familiar foodways and the ability to actually accomplish it were two very different things. Chicago was renowned as a railway hub and as a center for produce and goods. "There is no section of the country so remote that its food products do not come direct to Chicago as a first market," an 1895 article boasted:

Here is received the cattle of Texas, the grain of the Dakotas, the vines and fruits of California, fish from the Penobscot and oranges from Indian River, watermelons from Georgia and salmon form the Columbia river, persimmons from Tennessee and possums from Arkansas, apples from New York, peaches from Missouri and strawberries from everywhere.

Yet, many of the ingredients which went into traditional Italian cooking--garlic, olive oil, tomato paste, macaroni--were not the everyday fare of Chicagoans and the earliest Italian immigrants to Chicago did not find it effortless to replicate the diet to which they were accustomed. Truck farmers in the area surrounding Chicago grew crops suited to both the climate and the tastes of the locality. While railroads carried in produce from Florida and California, vegetables and spices favored by Italians--artichokes, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, eggplant, chick-peas, garlic, basil, and oregano--were initially largely unavailable or quite expensive. Other items were scarce. Americans favored soft cheeses rather than the hard cheeses preferred by Italians and the wines of California and the East Coast were avoided for both their taste and their prohibitive prices. Macaroni, that important staple of the Southern diet was not made from a hard durum wheat as in Italy and was available in only limited varieties. The United States may have been a land of abundance but it quite logically favored the food items which were easy to grow and suited to a "typical" American palate. The land of plenty meant plenty of American cooking. [71]

Homegrown and homemade are the explanations generally assumed for how Italians obtained and prepared their foods. While Italians made valiant efforts to do both, home gardening and processing were problematic in the new urban environment. The small garden patches in the rear of tenement flats were hardly sufficient to provide families with a continual supply of the fruits and vegetables they used in such quantity. Many of the plants Italians favored, such as fig trees, required intensive effort to cajole through a Chicago winter. Drying and preserving presented their own unique problems. Tomatoes left to dry in the sun were subject to the soot of the city or the drippings of a neighbor's wash hung overhead. Tenement flats lacked iceboxes, or even ice, and cellars often provided living space rather than storage. [72]

With large-scale migration, the demand for the familiar foods of Italy existed but the means to fulfill these demands affordably needed to be devised. Creative Italian entrepreneurs from both Northern and South Italy combined their experiences and skills as agriculturists in Italy with the new opportunities opened up by the concentration of large numbers of their countrymen in urban neighborhoods, to create an extensive food supply system. Two related areas existed. The first, and most visible, was the retailing of foods, evidenced by the numerous peddlers and specialty shops within Italian neighborhoods. The second, which often overlapped the first, was in the supply of products for these retailers. As early as 1895-96, the Bureau of Labor's study of 1,348 families in Chicago identified 307 individuals involved with the supply of food and drink either as employees, owners, or family contributors. Sixteen individuals were involved in the baking business, twenty-six with groceries, and ten with macaroni. Eighteen people dealt with alcohol, mainly working in saloons.

Thirty-eight candy factory employees and four candy makers were reported. The greatest numbers by far were involved in peddling, with fruit the dominant product. One hundred forty- eight fruit peddlers were counted. Other vendors sold gum, cheese, vegetables, ice cream and eggs. A few cooks, boarding house keepers, and miscellaneous factory employees were enumerated but only one butcher and one milk wagon driver. Italian green grocers, macaroni shops, and fruit stands dotted Italian settlements offering consumers access to the ingredients of their homeland and owners an opportunity to earn a living among compatriots who shared their language, their business practices, and their tastes. [73]
Italians depended on fellow compatriots for their business connections, their products, and their clientele. By exploiting the opportunities available in their new urban environment, many Italians eased their way into the business and consumer culture of their new home. It was a largely unrecognized adaptation, since it ran counter to the trends towards standardization and consolidation so prevalent in American business and since it was based on the satisfaction of a craving for the familiar and the accustomed rather than the new.