Books@Torontoist continues its coverage of Coach House Books’ new compendium of Hogtown food facts and stories, The Edible City: Toronto’s Food from Farm to Fork, which launches at the Gladstone Hotel on Sunday afternoon, with another excerpt from the book. Today Toronto editor, writer and poet Damian Rogers catches up to the biggest moveable feast in the city in “Ontario Food Terminal: Behind the Curtain.”
Ontario Food Terminal: Behind the Curtain
by Damian Rogers
The Ontario Food Terminal is a strange, mysterious and intimidating place to the outsider, and, unless you work in the produce industry, you, my friend, are an outsider. The gated and guarded terminal is not open to the general public and it doesn’t throw open its doors to the general media either; to gain access to the homely horseshoe-shaped government facility, you need to prove you have business there with someone on the inside. I spent three days there on assignment with a Florida-based produce trade magazine under the wing of a woman who has worked for years to cultivate relationships with those on the inside; when I went back by myself, I was blocked by security the minute I naively used the word “press” like it was a backstage pass. Eventually I convinced the guard I had a legitimate appointment.
Once you learn that an average of 5.1 million pounds of fruit, vegetables and related foodstuffs move through here on any given day, you begin to understand why they don’t want random people wandering around poking at the avocados. Because this is a business built around a perishable product, everyone who works at the terminal – the growers, the suppliers, the transporters, the wholesalers, the brokers and the retailers – are playing a perpetual game of Beat the Clock.
From the crack of dawn, the floors are flooded with throngs of shop owners from all over the city competing for the best goods while day workers hustle to unload boxes of fresh produce off trucks as soon as they dock. If while walking along the pedestrian walkway you sleepily drift out of the safety zone and into the main artery that links the long chain of companies, you might be run down by a motorized cart speeding from one temperature-controlled unit to another. This is not a racket for late risers: for many here, the day gets going well before sunrise and the bulk of the action is over by 9 a.m. By early afternoon the halls are nearly evacuated.
The primary purpose of the terminal is to get food from the fields onto market shelves, through a dizzying network of dealmakers. Nearly every tomato and potato, every banana, starfruit and Iranian fig that you see at your corner store or mid-sized market has filtered through the Ontario Food Terminal. Due to the volume they work with, the national grocery chains – like Loblaws, Walmart and Metro – buy the bulk of their produce directly from their own suppliers. Still, even the chains will call up wholesalers at the terminal when one of their orders comes up short – if the Boston lettuce shows up too wilted for their standards, for example – to fill in the gaps. But really, it’s the mom-and-pop shops – from the humblest veggie stall in Parkdale to the impossibly posh Pusateri’s in Rosedale – that drive the market in the morning.
Although modern forces have certainly had an effect on the way the terminal works since it was established on a forty-acre tract of choice real estate off the Queensway in Etobicoke in 1954 – emails play a larger role, there’s a greater demand for organic and locally grown product, there have been extensive renovations to improve labour safety – you get the sense that, at the heart of things, not much has changed in the last six decades. It’s still a heavily male dominated industry – there aren’t many women on the floor, and the ones I met were all born or married into the business – and each company depends entirely on maintaining close, long-term relationships with their customers for success. It’s bustling, but there’s a lot of closeness, even intimacy, here, too.
There’s a farmers’ market connected to the terminal that is newer to the scene, but many of the established wholesale and broker companies here are family-owned-and-run businesses forged two and three generations ago by mostly Italian, Jewish and Dutch immigrants. Immigration continues to play a vital role, particularly in Toronto, where the city’s multicultural identity is reflected directly in the items available on the market floor. One example is the Indian bitter melon – a crazy-looking, dark green, gnarled, tubular fruit I’d never seen before. When I asked Dorjee Namgyal at the Italian-owned Veg-Pak Produce Ltd. what it was, he explained that it’s prized in many Asian communities as a blood purifier. Namgyal – who speaks five languages, which allows him to connect to a broad customer base and makes it possible for Veg-Pak to stay in touch with emerging product demands – tells me the melon “has picked up in volume 70 percent in five years.” He recommends throwing it into stir-fries.
The produce industry, actually, is surprisingly influenced by what could be called food fashion. I saw crates and crates of pom-brand pomegranate juice, and some of the buyers spoke reverently about the success of that particular marketing campaign in persuading people of the benefits of the tart fruit’s antioxidant properties. People are hungry, literally, for food that is supercharged with healthy goodness. Novelty is also a major factor; another recent hit has been the mangosteen, a tropical fruit that had suffered under an import ban in the U.S. until a couple years ago. Although sometimes the rush to offer the latest of the latest yields some dodgy results – did anyone really need to engineer the looks-like-an-apple-but-tastes-like-a-grape “grapple” hybrid? Everyone I talked to thought it was a stupid product, but apparently it’s selling.
These trends make a difference in such a volatile business. Some companies down at the terminal distinguish themselves by focusing on a specific strength, while others strive to have a little bit of everything. But all are quick to acknowledge that it’s a speculative industry. Most of the wholesalers are also involved in multiple areas of the business – they are often also growers, shippers, importers and exporters. “We’re gamblers,” says Lorrie Goldfarb, president of Morris Brown & Sons Company Ltd., who calls himself “the Tomato Guy.” So many variable elements threaten their bottom line every day: the weather, the price of oil, the fluctuating dollar. Considering the degree of stress this can create, the atmosphere at the market is pretty warm and friendly – once you break into the inner circle, that is. People like to tell almost-off-colour jokes or family stories, many of which follow a similar trajectory: somebody’s father or grandfather built an international importing empire after starting out with nothing but ten dollars and a fruit cart.
(Photo from the Ontario Food Terminal Board website)
