A NICE IRONY : This past weekend an organic farmers market was launched in Del Monte Square at the Cannery, a place where (as the name suggests) food-industry giant Del Monte once canned fruit. The Cannery, in other words, was a food factory in days of yore (it was built in 1907 and became an urban mall 60 years later); now it is a spot for the getting of nonfactory, nonindustrial produce, along with some fish and flowers.

The Del Monte Square endeavor adds to the efflorescence of farmers markets that have popped up throughout the city in the past year or so. The Fillmore-Eddy market is back after its winter hiatus, while markets on 24th Street in Noe Valley and at the corner of Geary and Divisadero (under the auspices of Kaiser Permanente) are open year-round. They join longtime markets in the Civic Center, on Alemany Boulevard, and at Ferry Plaza – the last having been transformed from a Parisian-style medley of makeshift stalls in the middle of a road into a temple of gastronomy, with restaurants, permanent shops, and gobs of tourists and day-trippers insensitive to high prices. It is spectacular but (from what I hear city people murmuring) less than ideally suited to workaday needs.

The Cannery's market seems, at first blush, quite similar to the one at Ferry Plaza: a grand setting in a tourist-magnet neighborhood, et cetera. (The market is held Friday and Saturday mornings, from 8 a.m. to noon, in the granite-paved courtyard, which is dotted with old olive trees.) But market management does see its primary audience as consisting of the people who live in the Marina and North Beach, on Telegraph and Russian Hills.

Beyond that, the market closes a circle: it represents the return of freshness, seasonality, and locality (of produce as well as clientele) to a place once consecrated to the industrial treatment of food. In that sense, the Del Monte Square farmers market is a bit like opening a school in a building that was once a prison; it is chasing away of darkness and stuffiness by light and air. It is a kind of redemption.

Redemption is a timeless theme and, these days, an almost painfully pertinent one. The crisis over American abuse of inmates at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison reminds us that some places are haunted; for better or worse, a particular place can be a repository of memory that colors perceptions of the here and now. Wiser leaders than ours would have understood that Abu Ghraib should have been demolished, or converted to some – any – other use than as a prison. A farmers market might have been premature, but perhaps not very.