The pricing question has been circulating online again, sparked by a first-timer's sticker shock at an unnamed Bay Area market: $10 for a pint of blueberries, $15 for six peaches. The reactions split predictably between people who regard the farmers market as a weekly ritual and people who regard it as a performance of a certain kind of consumption. Both positions contain something true.

Alemany comes up, reliably, whenever this argument surfaces. It's the market people point to when they mean a farmers market that still functions the way the original California Certified Farmers Market program intended — fresher food, from the grower, without the grocery-chain markup layered back in. The vendors there tend to be the vendors, not distributors who rented a tent.

The apples at a supermarket, one commenter noted accurately, may have been in cold storage for the better part of a year, picked green for shipping durability, then waxed. The blueberries at a well-run stall were picked ripe, of varieties selected for flavor rather than shelf life. That's a real difference, though it doesn't fully explain a $10 pint.

What it explains, maybe, is the closing-time economy. Show up five minutes before a market wraps, and the calculus shifts: no vendor wants to reload strawberries or heirloom tomatoes into a truck for a 90-minute drive back to the valley. Prices drop, sometimes substantially. It's not a secret, exactly — it's just information that circulates among regulars rather than tourists.

Tomorrow morning, Alemany opens at six. The pyramids will go up. Someone will get there early for the good corn, and someone else will circle back at the end for whatever's left at whatever the vendor decides it's worth.