Do Greenmarkets Suck?

Greenmarkets are either great resources for supermarket- and fresh food-starved neighborhoods or the quickest way to be parted with $30 or $40 outside of Atlantic City (or both!). Now we have to worry that vendors aren’t just going to Costco and selling a bunch of wholesale junk. Bastards! The Times’ City section does its part to continue the whispering campaign:

The city’s greenmarkets have lately brimmed with August’s familiar bounty. At 54 markets, tables are piled high with bulbous eggplant, luscious blackberries, and at least a dozen precious varieties of heirloom tomato. But behind the selling booths, a rumor persists at a low din among farmers that some in their ranks sell items they neither grew nor produced themselves, in violation of the strict “producer-only” rules put in place by the city Greenmarket program.

At the market at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza last week, Tammy Osczepinski of S. & S. O. Produce Farms in Goshen, N.Y., said that such hearsay was typical among greenmarket sellers.

“I’ve heard these rumors floating around for years,” she said with a shrug while bagging a head of escarole for a customer. “But this is a grow-your-own market, and that’s how it should be.”

. . .

. . . Rachel Faber Machacha, Greenmarket’s farm inspection coordinator, said it was rare but not unheard of for a farmer to augment his own supply with produce grown by another farmer, or even bought from a wholesale market. During August and September, her busiest months, Ms. Machacha travels from farm to farm verifying that what producers submit to Greenmarket as their annual crop plan is what they are actually growing. If something doesn’t add up, she investigates further.

“We’re slow to accuse, but pretty quick to respond if we hear concerns,” she said. “We thoroughly look at something before we issue a violation.”

Only a handful of violations are issued a year, Mr. Strumolo said. The most recent came a couple of weeks ago, when a mushroom producer who worked at multiple markets was found selling morel mushrooms and suspended for a month. Morels, Mr. Strumolo explained, grow in the New York region only in the early spring, so the producer must have been buying them elsewhere.