Last week, while shopping at a tiny produce market on Mott Street, Giselle Isaac found a crazy bargain: fresh ginger for 50 cents a pound. She promptly stuffed a plastic bag to bursting with the pungent root.

“I’m West Indian and we make a lot of ginger beer,” she explained. “This is the cheapest I’ve seen ginger in years.”

Ms. Isaac, a teacher’s assistant, lives way up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, but she is one of the many New Yorkers who frequent Chinatown for fruits and vegetables. “The food is fresher,” she said, “and Chinatown is way cheaper.”

I never gave Chinatown’s crowded produce markets a chance; I figured the prices were cheap because the selection is all C-grade bok choy and yesterday’s bananas.

Wrong again! I toured the markets with Valerie Imbruce, an economic botanist who spent more than a decade researching the community’s produce supply chain. She even wrote a book on the topic, “From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace.”