SAN FRANCISCO — It's 6 a.m., and the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market is still bustling, even as a workday that began at midnight is winding down.
One grocery owner surveys the boxes of vegetables and fruits stacked before him in the North Bay Produce Co., looking for the plumpest of the plump, the ripest of the ripe. All about him, in a rhythm that seems simultaneously chaotic and precise, workers push dollies loaded with peppers, melons, peaches, cherries, lettuce, tomatoes and other produce to waiting trucks bound for many of the city's restaurants, supermarkets or corner stores.
It's the same scene that has played out for nearly a century at the Strip District's Pennsylvania Railroad Fruit Auction & Sales Building, known by most as the produce terminal.
But while the city of Pittsburgh has all but abandoned its terminal's wholesale produce business, San Francisco is reinvesting in its market, seeing the produce exchange as a source of jobs and economic development.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
