Joel Grover, a TV news scam buster for NBC Los Angeles, who is famous for catching car-repair swindles and filthy restaurant kitchens on camera, recently unleashed his camera team on the city’s vast and cherished network of 300 farmers markets. He discovered something that would not have come as a shock to readers of this blog -- “some farmers at these markets are making false claims and flat-out lies about the produce they’re selling.”
Grover reported that his team found prevaricating vendors at more than two dozen farmers markets in the Los Angeles area. It didn’t take much digging to expose some of the brazen and shameless lies he heard.
NBCLA’s undercover cameras caught trucks connected with Frutos Farms loading up with produce at wholesale produce warehouses in downtown L.A. before heading out to farmers markets. They found Juan Uriostegui selling broccoli that he said he had harvested on his farm in Redlands -- from a field that Grover found to be bone-dry and filled with weeds. And they discovered that strawberries sold by Mary Ellen Martinez at the Torrance Farmers Market, which she claimed were pesticide-free, in fact had high levels of four different pesticides.
Here’s a written summary of Grover’s broadcast: “False Claims, Lies Caught on Tape at Farmers Markets.”
Bravo to Grover. Rooting out scam artists like those he found -- and embarrassing the so-called farmers markets that harbor them -- is one way to help bring an end to the problem.
Reporters for the Sunday Times of London conducted a similar investigation with similar results in 2007. Local news teams everywhere should get in on the fun.
THANKS FOR ALL OF YOUR REALLY GREAT WORK!
Thanks for drawing attention to all the FAKE LOCAL FOOD (and FAKE ORGANIC FOOD) that's coming into the local food markets.
I'm a CSA farmer. We are REALLY getting clobbered by 'middlemen' here in the DC-area.
The link to the original news story has rotted. I hope you can fix it.
Thanks
Posted by: Allan Balliett | October 24, 2010 at 05:47 AM