The myth of the marketplace
We left the house at 5:45 this morning, snow falling despite predictions of clear skies. The commuters were already awake, making their way into Boston. And we headed for an industrial corner of the city that surely stays up all night, the New England Produce Market. At the entrance, a dunkin donuts serves weary truckers who’ve just driven through the night, as does the King Arthur Strip Club. A vendor on the sidewalk sells t-shirts that read “Fuck A-Rod.”
I pictured, at the least, a marketplace; a corridor of vendors displaying their produce and restaurateurs browsing for the week’s supply. What I found instead were cardboard boxes, stacked to the ceiling, a highway of forklifts and unmarked semi-trucks. We stayed mostly outside, searching for empty boxes and various farm supplies. Walking through a potato house, every man looked up as a I passed. “They don’t see many women around here,” Kevin said to me. In the warehouse, men dumped potatoes from hundred pound bags, sorted out the rotten, and re-packed them into smaller boxes, so Idaho potatoes co-mingled with Mexico-grown potatoes, bound for some New England grocery store. Outside, potatoes littered the asphalt, their long journeys ending in rejection.
I am forgetful of scale. But on a morning where I awoke before the sun and trekked into a city of tangled streets, I stood between boxes, between trucks, between warehouses, supposedly each filled with produce, and was reminded that I am tiny.
