IF YOU'VE BEEN holding your breath while the corporate deck is reshuffled at the former Real Food Company store on 24th Street in Noe Valley, it's time to exhale – and not because the store is reopening (that hasn't happened yet) but because the neighborhood is finally getting a farmers market of its very own. The first market will be held Saturday, Dec. 6, from 8 a.m. to noon, on the site (between Sanchez and Vicksburg Streets) of what was once Dan's Auto Service and is now a parking lot owned by the Noe Valley Ministry, a Presbyterian church (apparently with some deep pockets) just around the corner. The list of (mostly organic) growers is for the moment fairly brief – fewer than a dozen – but includes names that will be familiar from other local farmers markets.

The launch of the Noe Valley market will be politically edgier than most: a principal motivation for starting the market now, according to its community organizers, is to signal to Nutraceuticals, the out-of-state corporation that abruptly closed the Real Food at the end of August for "remodeling" and fired the staff, that it's unlikely to be business as usual if and when the store reopens.

No indeed, and not just because of petitions and labor-relations meetings. The year now ending may well be remembered as the one when neighborhood farmers markets reached a critical mass in San Francisco; in addition to the new Noe Valley endeavor, there was a successful spring-to-fall market at Fillmore and Eddy Streets, and under the auspices of Kaiser-Permanente, another has begun operating year-round on Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the big lot at Geary and Divisadero. And although Fillmore-Eddy departed for the winter after Nov. 22, an organizer told me the market had been a hit and would return sometime in the spring, probably as a year-round event.

What all this means is that growers have found it makes economic sense to bring produce directly to the people. Offer it and they will come – and keep coming, in ever greater numbers. If the Noe Valley market is a success – and it is hard to see how it couldn't be, given the neighborhood's affluence and sociopolitical awareness – the remodeled Real Food Co., under whatever name, will be reopening in an environment quite different from the one it left at the end of last summer. It will no longer be the only source for high-quality heirloom foodstuffs, able to charge whatever the market will bear for them, for it will have lost its monopoly. Market values for a brave new world, you might say.