FOOD SECURITYThe Rising Threat to New York City’s Food System
The Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, the largest of its kind in the country, serves as the penultimate stop for 4.5 billion pounds of food that feed the city and surrounding areas each year. Losing access to that hub could be catastrophic for a city that produces almost none of its own food.
It was barely past dawn when Bruce Reingold pushed through industrial plastic flaps and slid open the insulated door that led into a massive refrigerated warehouse. Inside, people hustled in every direction, some on foot with clipboards in hand and some driving pallet jacks capable of carrying 2,000 pounds.
Brown cartons, containing everything from short ribs to lamb chops to chicken breast to pork shoulder and more, were stacked everywhere, about to fill the trucks parked against the building’s loading docks. Those trucks would soon be on their way, bound for different destinations across New York City, including restaurants, hotels, bodegas, schools and food pantries.
Welcome to the Hunts Point Cooperative Market, the point of distribution for 35 percent of the meat that enters the five boroughs. That’s more than 1 billion pounds of meat annually.
Reingold has managed the market for more than three decades. But recently the city, which owns the land, has begun exploring changes to the market’s aging infrastructure to address a growing threat. “Some of the buildings are in a flood zone,” Reingold said, referring to the areas designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as being at particularly high risk. While flooding hasn’t been an issue for the market in the past, he added, “the city is supposedly investing a lot of money in flood protection.” Situated at the tip of the Hunts Point peninsula in the Bronx, where the East River meets the Bronx River, the distribution center is already prone to flooding in some areas, and the risks are likely to grow in the coming decades.
The wholesale meat market, along with a produce market and a fish market, make up the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, the largest of its kind in the country. Together, they serve as the penultimate stop for 4.5 billion pounds of food that feed the city and surrounding areas each year.
“Hunts Point feeds the entire region,” said Ora Kemp, a senior policy advisor at the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy. “That’s stock in grocery stores, all of our restaurants, all of our food service, our emergency food network.”
Losing access to that hub could be catastrophic for a city that produces almost none of its own food.
“If we don’t keep Hunts Point operational, the entire East Coast will suffer,” Kemp said.
