It was 5 a.m. on a Thursday in May and Marshall Cohen was furious about the state of his cucumbers.
He’d ordered them earlier that morning at a farm stand in the Ontario Food Terminal, the biggest wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Canada.
As is the custom, Cohen’s order was delivered to his truck, parked at a loading bay at the far end of the terminal, just off the Queensway in Etobicoke. But when the cucumbers arrived, Cohen’s truck driver noticed yellow spots and bruises. He took photos and sent them to Cohen, who was still walking around the market, now looking for size-25 hothouse tomatoes.
“It’s a joke!” Cohen screamed when he saw the photos.
He forwarded them to the cucumber salesman, waited a few minutes, then got him on the phone.
“I’d say good morning, but it’s not a very good morning,” Cohen said. “Did you see the pictures I just sent you?”
The salesman hadn’t seen the photos.
“Well you look at those f——-g pictures,” he said. “Are you f——-g kidding me? OK, take a look at what you sent me. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Oh f—-,” the young salesman said, realizing he’d just sent bad cucumbers to one of oldest and most revered produce buyers at the terminal.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Cohen said, “you should say ‘Oh f—-.’”
If you’ve lived in or around Toronto in the last 45 years, there’s a decent chance you’ve eaten something that Cohen, 78, personally selected from the thousands of pallets stacked up at farm stands and refrigerated warehouses in the terminal. He has bought produce for fruit markets, restaurants and grocery stores, including Summerhill Market.
People here treat him like one of the last old masters of an art form. But he is out of time, still insisting on face-to-face deals in a world of screens, holding out hope that he can pass on his secrets and his methods before he retires, because if he doesn’t, it will be a loss for everyone in this city who finds pleasure in a perfect piece of fruit.
On the phone, the cucumber salesman tried to explain that they’d sent the wrong pallet by mistake. Cohen interrupted: “Please exchange it now. Goodbye.”
When he hung up, he hit the button on his phone so hard that his arm swung back, as if he’d fired a gun.
The food terminal operates as a secret world in the middle of the city. More than two billion pounds of produce flow through the food terminal every year, making it one of the most important hubs in the North American fruit and vegetable trade. The public is forbidden inside, but behind the gatehouse, just off the Gardiner Expressway, buyers are making split-second decisions that determine what people around the province eat.
You can try to pick the nicest fruit at your local grocer, but at that stage, your sense of choice is largely an illusion. Squeeze and taste the green grapes all you want. The whole display probably all came from the same skid, from the same growing region, picked on the same day.
On grapes, Cohen can opt for premium, known as number ones, or discounted number twos. There are different varieties, from different countries, sold by different wholesalers at the terminal, who give different deals, depending on the buyer. Each shipment of grapes has spent a different amount of time on a cargo ship, in a truck, waiting at port. They have different levels of sweetness, different sizes and colours, a different pop when you bite down.
The strength of your local market’s produce section depends on how the buyer navigates those options, or whether they choose to buy at all. Earlier this month, for instance, grapes were caught in a gap in the global weave of growing seasons. The last of the good, late-season grapes from Peru and Chile were gone and Mexico’s season was just starting up, so the available grapes were small and sour. Some buyers went for the Mexican crop anyway, because they needed to get grapes on the shelf. Not Cohen.
His method, which he learned from the old buyers who mentored him in the early 1980s, is probably best described as: Bite It, Squeeze It, Smell It. If the product does not pass that test, he walks.
“You can’t buy over the phone,” he told me recently. “I don’t trust anybody. I want to see.”
I met Cohen in 2021, when I was working on a story and needed a guide at the food terminal. Since then, he’s called me regularly, asked about my family, sent holiday greetings and let me shadow him for dozens of hours at the terminal, where he has made me eat an immense amount of fruit. He carries a knife on him to cut into the larger specimens, like melons.
One morning, during a frenzied lecture on why his tomato provider is the best in the terminal, he pushed a little tomato into my hands and barked, “Put that in your mouth.”
A while later, a tomato flew past my head. I looked up and saw two buyers rummaging through a case of discount hot house tomatoes, flinging the rotten ones into the air without looking where they were going. Another came at me, and another. I don’t think Cohen even noticed it was happening.
As we walked around the farmers’ market, a driver on the back of a power jack called out to us. Power jacks, the delivery carts that are central to the terminal’s chaotic ballet, are always buzzing around with skids of produce, reversing at high speed into impossible parking spots.
“Marshall!” the man yelled.
Cohen barely even noticed the chaos. A power jack would come within centimetres of him and he wouldn’t flinch.
“They know not to hit the old man,” he said.
Earlier in his career, a power jack clipped him so badly he thought it snapped his ankle. It didn’t, but he couldn’t walk for four days.
I asked what he said to the driver.
“What do you think I said to him?”
This spring, he introduced me to growers, salespeople and other buyers, and gave each a similar instruction: “Tell him the truth. No bulls—-.” Then Cohen would walk away so I could ask them about him. But he never went far and I’d hear him in the distance, shouting on the phone.
“Marshall is part of the elite club,” Pino Prosa, a salesman at Canadian Fruit & Produce told me. “The new way of buying is this,” Prosa said, pointing to his cellphone. “They’re just texting orders.”
As Prosa talked, I could see Cohen in the edge of my vision, wandering around Prosa’s sales floor, slapping melons.
He was in his usual black baseball cap, with dark glasses, a black puffer jacket and a black vest over top, which one of the wholesalers had gifted him years back. Before it faded, the vest had Cohen’s nickname, “Legend,” emblazoned on the breast, but now you could only make out the L.
I asked him why he was slapping melons. He said some of the honeydews were early-season, so they’d be low in sugar content and taste almost like cucumbers. He picked up a honeydew from another region, that was later in its growing season, and shoved it in my face.
“Take a deep breath,” he said. “Sniff it in hard.”
It smelled syrupy.
“See?” he said. “There’s sugar. There’s flavour.”
After Cohen’s blow-up with the cucumber salesman, his anger evaporated. It was a special morning, not to be spoiled by yellow-spotted cucumbers. One of his favourite farmers had finally arrived at the market.
Welsh Bros., a farm out of Scotland, Ont., produces what Cohen considers to be the finest asparagus in the province. He had been anticipating for it for weeks.
That day, Welsh Bros. was selling for $90 a case. Before Welsh Bros. arrived, asparagus was going for as much as $130 a case. Now no one would dare charge more, Cohen said.
On the way to Welsh Bros., Cohen’s boss called, asking Cohen to add size-27 kiwis to his list, which at that point included about two dozen items, including four cases of figs, 20 of the fingerling potatoes, two of the watermelon radish, and a case of French beans.
“OK, listen, the French beans are all s—-,” he told his boss. “They’re all spotted. They’re garbage.”
At Welsh Bros.’ farm stand, Cohen waved over the asparagus, like he was warming his hands on its glow. There was no smell to it. Bad asparagus stinks like fish, he said.
Each Welsh Bros. bunch had straight spears that were all the same size, so they’d cook evenly. Cohen pulled out a piece and ran his finger up it, tracing the flashes of blue and purple in the tip.
“Just look at this,” he said. “This stuff talks to you.”
Cohen is lean with a wooden walk that makes him look almost like a bird of prey, the kind you see in an enclosure at a sanctuary, slower and gnarled, but still, no one’s putting their finger in the cage. There are also days when he says he feels 35, when the weather is right and the arthritis in his shoulders and knees isn’t acting up.
“I’ve looked at people my age, even younger, and they’ve retired too early. Their brain has gone soft, their muscle tone has gone soft,” he said. “I have my cappuccino in the morning, talk to the guys. It’s sort of like a way of life.”
Until last year, he was the buyer for Summerhill Market, a long stint that owner Brad McMullen said helped elevate the chain’s produce department.
Before that, Cohen was the buyer for his own small chain of stores, Eglinton Fine Foods, for almost 25 years. He sold cars for a few years before Summerhill brought him back to the terminal. Lately, he starts at about 4 a.m. and works four or five hours a day, buying for what’s known as a jobber, a company that supplies restaurants, grocers and institutions.
Over the course of his career, Cohen has watched the terminal change. Since the 1950s, the terminal has been the main stock exchange for fruit and vegetables, a central gathering place for farmers from all over the province. More recently, major grocery chains have opened their own giant produce distribution centres and left the terminal. The big grocers still do business here when their own warehouses run short on items. But the terminal is now a lifeline for independents, who can’t rely on sprawling corporate supply chains — the family farmers, regional supermarket banners, chefs, caterers, ethnic grocers and start-up food manufacturers.
“It feels like it’s from a different era,” said University of Toronto assistant professor Sarah Elton, who studies the terminal. “It’s so vital and important for today, also.”
The warehouses operate like big refrigerated showrooms, with pallets of product on display from all over the world and salespeople roaming the floor.
“I might get lucky with limes here,” he said, digging into a box at one of the showrooms. “Woah, woah, I’m going to buy these. These are beautiful. These are nice. They’re firm, clean.”
I asked if they were the right size.
“That’s the perfect one,” he whispered at me as we approached the salesman to negotiate a price. “Don’t say nothing.”
A lot of the time, I felt like the new boyfriend at someone else’s family dinner. Cohen played the helpful uncle, leaning in to add the necessary context to what was going on in front of me: That salesman used to be the toughest guy at the terminal. That man just lost his wife. That kid shouldn’t have bought all those watermelons.
In the hall, Cohen flagged down a young guy who’d worked his way up at one of the wholesalers.
“What do you call me?” he asked.
“The Legend?” the man said.
“No, besides that,” Cohen said.
“Oh! Uncle Marsh,” the man said.
I got the sense that Cohen sees Uncle Marsh as his last great role, his King Lear.
“He still calls some of my friends, to this day, to check in on them,” said Cohen’s 51-year-old son, Justin. “He would call my business partner when I was out of town just to check in and make sure I was doing a good job.”
When Justin was at university, before cellphones, Cohen would call Justin’s house.
“I would hear my roommates answer the phone and be on the phone for 10 minutes talking to someone,” Justin, the eldest of Cohen’s three sons, said. “And then finally they would say, ‘Hey it’s your dad, he wants to talk to you.’ ”
A few times this spring, usually in the late morning when his buying was done, Cohen confessed to me that something was nagging at him. It was part of the reason he was still working at 78. He wanted to find an apprentice, but he had left Summerhill too abruptly to properly train one.
“I don’t think that’s ever going to happen now,” he said. “It’s too late.”
The best he can do, at this point, is slowly let his secrets slip, here and there.
“Did you see the Rainier cherries?” he told some younger buyers recently. “Go look at them.”
It would have taken at least a year, likely two, to pass on all his rules and stratagems. One of them has to do with spreading your business around to different suppliers. If there’s a fire on a banana ship and you haven’t been spreading your banana business around, you probably won’t have a relationship with the one supplier at the terminal who still has bananas that day.
Another rule, he told me, is to “never give a guy a third chance.” I thought at first it must have something to do with fear and respect. But it was actually about forgiveness. Don’t give a guy a third chance, but you’ve got to give him a second.
About an hour or so after the ugly phone call, Cohen looped back around to see the cucumber salesman face to face. His name was Khushal Bhinder, one of the younger produce dealers at the farmers’ market.
“I’ve got to give this guy credit,” Cohen said on the way to see Bhinder. “He started with nothing.”
Bhinder smiled when he saw Cohen coming.
Cohen pulled him into a hug.
“I’m sorry,” Cohen said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it’s OK,” the salesman told him. “You can say anything.”
