Eggplants, artichokes, corn, tomatoes, peaches, apples, melons. Boxes of them lined the wall of my parents' garage in northern New Jersey. On warm summer afternoons in the 1960s, their rich, sweet aroma wafted out to the driveway, where I'd be playing stickball or drawing hopscotch courts with chalk on the hot blacktop.

My dad was a fruit and vegetable wholesaler in lower Manhattan and then the Bronx, the business founded by my grandfather and one typical for many Italian Americans in the New York area in the first half of the 20th century. Selling food was my father's work, and cooking it was his passion.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/