It’s a chaotic Tuesday morning at the produce market of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, the largest food distribution center in the U.S., nestled on the eastern edge of the South Bronx. At 329 acres, it’s also one of the biggest food hubs in the world. Its long, narrow outdoor platforms are crowded with people carrying produce from the back of 18-wheelers on one side of the platform into refrigerated warehouses on the other. Stepping around boxes of asparagus from California and avocados from Mexico, wholesalers haggle over prices above the hum of dozens of trucks. Once sold, the produce will go back into a fleet of trucks and travel across New York City and much of the East Coast, supplying supermarket chains, restaurants, and mom and pop stores.
Distributing 4.5 billion pounds of food each year, the produce market is undeniably crucial to the region’s food supply – but it comes at a cost. Thousands of diesel trucks criss-cross the region to end up at the market, spewing pollutants into the air that fuel climate change and disproportionately affect the health of the dense, low-income communities of color in Hunts Point and other neighborhoods in the South Bronx.
