At 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, Nathan Forster, who works for the Wholesale Greenmarket in Hunts Point, was gesturing to a pallet of problematic onions that sat near a truck.
The Wholesale Greenmarket, run by the nonprofit GrowNYC, sells over 100 different varieties of farm products wholesale to small grocers, institutions, restaurants, and distributors in New York; the idea is to find small markets for local growers, insuring that the produce comes “straight from the farm each morning,” and that therefore “their products travel a very short distance ensuring premium quality, and greater food safety and traceability,” according to the Greenmarket’s website.
But the distributor that supplied this pallet of onions had confessed to Forster they’d come from growers in Texas and Mexico.
