Have you ever been roaming around in a city or small town and stumbled upon a produce market? You probably have. Long story short, where the hell do these people get this stuff?

I grew up in a family where my mother has been in the food business my entire life. I spent many years in my early life going into South Philadelphia, into these huge food warehouses, with beeping machines and union guys moving pallet after pallet of anything food related onto trucks. It is an odd area of Philly, right near all the major stadiums. You go a few blocks past the Phillies and 76'ers bright lights, and it is a rundown, concrete jungle; business's that are the bare neccesaties. No fancy buildings, run down lots here and there. It is straight business and it is odd. It is all food distribution plants. Take a drive on Packer Avenue and you see some odd things. Companies catering to business's looking for fish, Chinese, Italian, organic, food banks..... you name it, and someone there caters to it.

Well, I was living in Philly, coming up with odd jobs for myself to make money without having a boss. I spent a few days cruising around the aformetnioned area, trying to figure out how things worked around there. I knew there were straight-laced places, but I knew there was also alot of hustling going on. That is when I found out about the Philadelphia Regional Produce Market. First, yes, it is a completely legitimate place, but, there was some space to breath. This wasn't like the fish distributors nearby or the Sysco's or US Foodservices. This was a go in and shoot the shit with some Italians and bargain down the price of tomatoes kind of place.... not a place with the strictest of price sheets. Some people who went there were strict and looked for a standard price, etc. Then there were people like me, buying a box of this and that, here and there. They were lenient towards my cause and I am sure they have seen thousands like me, trying to hock a tomato to a restaurant for more than I bought it for.

So, I woke up one day and told myself that today was the day I would go into the market. It was early. I left around 6AM. When I arrived at the front gate, I paid my 3$ admission fee. I had no clue what I was doing. All I saw was a huge stretch of loading docks with huge trucks pulled up to them. These docks were long. Long, long, long, with lots of trucks. I pulled my busted up little four door car in between some semi's and went exploring. First things first, there was food everywhere.....I am talking in the parking lot. Food would go bad there and when it did, they would throw it off the docks into the parking lot. Piles, large piles, of some nasty looking produce, and some stuff that looked pretty good....I had seen at times, many times, people salvaging through the food for products that hadn't gone completely bad yet. So, the layout of the place....there were about 30 companies, divided into I guess what you would call Piers. 15 on each. They faced each other and in between is where all the trucks and cars would park. I found a staircase and started walking. There were people making deals, forklifts whizzing by. I felt like everyone knew I had no place being there and that I was blatantly trying to hustle someone. It was true. I asked how much this was, how much that was, wrote things down on my little pad, compared prices, bla bla bla, looked like a jerk.

That is when I found my niche. There was a company there called Procacci Brother's. In front of their space was a stack of boxes containing organic apples. I ask "how much?" "How about 5$." Done deal. I bought, I would say, a few hundred organic apples for 5$. Why so cheap? They were what they call #2's. This explained the mass amounts of food on the ground. For sanitation reasons, regulations, inspections, etc, food that was going bad, aka #2's, quickly became food for the parking lot....which was plowed every night and dumped somewhere. The apples were 85% good, so I began my first true introduction to the docks. I went through the apples, kept the good ones, and threw the bad ones onto the ground. It was kind of fun, and definitely funny. I carried my boxes to my car and said goodbye. Anyway, so I left with say 8 boxes of organic apples. Now I had to sell them. I basically went cold calling. I went knocking on doors of kitchens, corner stores, etc pushing organic apples. I made my money back. My only expense had been gas, 3$ entrance fee, and 5$ for the apples. I made say 100$, and I left about 50 apples on my doorstep for my neighbors, about 10 of which were crushed on the front sidewalk.

I quickly learned apples were not a hot commodity. So, I went back, day after day. Potatoes, tomatoes, onions....food that everyone used was much easier to sell. I could go up to a random Mexican restaurant and get rid of a box of red peppers like it was nothing. But, at the end of the day, I was really busting my ass,  and kind of realizing that if I wanted to do this food thing, I would have to do it properly, which is something I wasn't really looking to do....this was just for a few extra bucks, not a new job. So, I learned and watched and realized where our food comes from, and I learned the wide range in which these distributors affected. I don't do percentages or stats, but I can tell you that more people and small business and restaurants get their food from similar distributors than you may realize. Based purely on my anthropological findings, I would venture to say that a majority of all the food we encounter in tradtional venues....aka, non-100%organic/local...... is derived from the docks.This brings me to the other part of my story.

I learned that selling tomatoes from the back of my trunk made some money, but was probably a bigger pain than anything. But, I also learned about farmers markets, and roadside produce stands, and neighborhood markets, and the guy selling fruit from his truck. So, you drive through a city and you see a produce market. Where do they get their food from? They sometimies have organic, right? And hippie markets have organic, right? They go to the same markets I went to. See, here is the thing....it is a totem pole. It is a ladder. By the time you get your food from the corner store in Reading, PA,  or get those funky Middle Eastern veggies from those Middle-Eastern produce markets in Allentown, unless it is from the farmer, it is organic all the way from China. Yes, it might have been organic at one point, but these veggies rack up more miles in their little lifespan than I will drive all year. It ain't fresh. Chances are, unless you are buying directly from a farmer, your food came into a port city, picked up by a distributor, picked up by another distributor, sold to some guy with a box truck, sold to a corner store, and put into your kitchen pot. This isn't even taking into consideration where it was before the veggie bid farewell on its trip across the ocean. These greens are not from America. Sure, there are some. Sure, there are some potatoes that come from Idaho, but you better believe alot of this stuff is from places you'd have to pay a lot of money to get to. More food than you realize comes through these docks. Large supermarkets, famous chefs, 5 star restaurants go to the docks, a kind of nasty, kind of romantic, old school, business is business kind of place, full of teamsters and hustlers. Your fancy organic baby broccolini has blue collar all over it before it gets to you.  

It is a business. It is a commodity. Some people buy food to eat and some people buy food to sell to people to eat. The business people want to get as close to the foods origin as possible. That is why when this food comes off the ships from across the world, it is snatched up in every port by someone with more money than you, so they can sell it you. So, next time you go to an organic market, check where they get their food from, because it might have been sold to them by me, via Joey, via Captain Cook, via Miguel in Honduras. Doesn't seem so organic anymore.