PEOPLE TELL ME the airports are pretty much deserted these days – well-guarded echo chambers – and the question naturally arises as to where yesterday's herds of air travelers have gone. Choking freeway traffic suggests one answer, the inaugural mobs at the Ferry Plaza farmers market another.

We paid our own inaugural visit (to the latter) on a warm Saturday morning recently, making sure beforehand that our cell phones were fully charged and otherwise in good working order. For the market is, at least for the moment, a cell-phone sort of place – sprawling and crowded and navigable only by the old point-to-point method. I am standing five paces south of the Aidell's sausage stand! you shout into your little handset, hoping to be heard and understood, hoping that you have got your directions straight and that the person with whom you're attempting to rendezvous is similarly well oriented. Around you, other people – many other people – are speaking urgently into their own handsets. The level of cell-phone usage is reminiscent of that at some big airport, circa 1999.

It would be churlish, in our Age of Genetically Modified Foods, to see anything but glory in a crowded urban farmers market. Huge crowds queuing for organic peaches and baby salad greens make a vivid statement; they also provide the cash flow that makes small-scale, ecologically sustainable agriculture an economically sustainable proposition in a world of agribusiness giants.

But huge crowds are not quite pleasant to deal with for the more deliberative food shoppers among us. I found myself swept up in nostalgia for the original market, which set up every Saturday morning in the middle of a then "unimproved" Embarcadero as, essentially, a very large roadside produce stand. It wasn't a glamorous event, and its very plainness made it easier to incorporate into one's routine. It was where we went every Saturday morning for years to supply ourselves with fruit and vegetables and edible sundries. We didn't need cell phones to locate each other, and the tone of things was slightly sleepy – almost rural.

That's all gone now, replaced by, among other things, high prices and event-seekers willing to pay them. It is possible – I hope probable – that with a bit of time the mood will settle down. The market, or aspects of it, will operate every day; that alone should help right the balance between routine and event. Eventfulness has its place in life, of course, and we all have our little caches of unforgettable food events – high peaks towering above the green valley of routine, where most of life is lived and most of its satisfactions achieved.