The smell of caramel corn tempted my nose long before my family and I reached the blue umbrellas shading the vendors' stands of the Oakland Farmer's Market.

I chanted my mantra, "I won't, I won't, I won't," as we detoured past the stall. All around us, people with blissful smiles reached into plastic bags the size of plump sofa cushions and popped handfuls of lightly caramelized kernels into their mouths.

"I won't, I won't, I won't," I said again, but it sure smelled good!

The Appeal of Jack London Square
Operating year round, Oakland's Sunday Farmers' Market sprawls in a casually organized way along the waterfront at historic Jack London Square. Bookstores, restaurants, art galleries and gift shops line one side of the wharf. On the other side, kayaks, red and green tugboats, ferry boats heading for San Francisco and millionaires' three-story yachts cruise up and down the estuary. The mournful sound of an Amtrak train down the coast makes little kids run to wave at the engineer. In the middle of the market a fountain splashes, and there's usually a Jamaican man with dreadlocks and a smile as shiny as his steel drum playing reggae music that makes everyone within earshot grin along with him.

The Farmer's Market is an ideal place for parents with children of any age to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday. There's plenty for the kids to look at, tidbits of food to sample – peaches, nuts, strawberries, crackers with a smorgasbord of dips, sausages, watermelon, fresh breads and bagels and much more – pigeons to chase, grass to roll on, other children to stare at and an international mix of people speaking their native languages. When I visited, I heard Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian and a few that I didn't recognize. Mentally, I matched the different languages to the food: churros, ravioli, pastries, fried rice, sushi, pad Thai and samosas. These ethnic food offerings broaden my children's palates, just as exposure to people of other races and cultures broadens their minds.

Finally we strolled far enough away from the caramel corn stand that the fragrance faded and gave way to an equally wonderful aroma coming from several mountains of fresh basil, clusters so huge that a 2-year-old completely disappeared behind the bunch he carried. Near the basil, eggplants and tomatoes from Sebastopol tumbled from wicker baskets, bottles of flavored olive oils from Santa Rosa balanced in earthquake-defying pyramids, sausages from Bruce Aidell's Berkeley company simmered in warming trays and rainbow-colored pasta from Monterey tangled in half-pound heaps. I stood in one spot, looked around, and saw ... dinner!

Having worked our way up one side of the market, we came to the southern end of the market. The children raced to an old, weathered log cabin and pushed their faces through the windows of the one-room log cabin that Jack London lived in during his years of prospecting in the Yukon. As Oakland was his hometown, a literary society moved the rustic cabin to this location many years ago, and a bronze statue of him stands nearby, with a quote:

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. I would rather be ashes than dust.

Apparently he meant what he said. He died in 1916 at age 40 from kidney failure, perhaps brought on by a life of excess.

Food Galore!
Heading back in the opposite direction, we sipped freshly pressed apple juice as we wended our way past stands of more sizes, colors and shapes of potatoes than I thought possible. Some looked like little brown marbles; others resembled the fat thumbs of longshoremen. Some were purple; others were white, yellow or brown. Next came peppers, even striped ones, as bright as Christmas lights, then breads from 10 different countries and finally smoked and frozen fish from Monterey Bay. Huge, long-stemmed strawberries begged to be dipped into chocolate. I bought one for my niece, and she spent the rest of the morning with a milk chocolate smudge on the end of her nose.

Vendors with juice dripping from their elbows cut slices from deep yellow peaches and offered them to all passers-by. Ruby slabs of watermelon lay like mosaic tiles on trays of crushed ice. Nectarines, circular rounds of honeydew melons and baskets of raspberries lay on a sloping countertop, arranged to look like a glittering display in a jewelry store. There's even something for the animals: homemade, people-shaped dog biscuits to reward hungry puppies, and tubs of Kitty Grass to "aid digestion and help prevent hairballs" for housebound kitties.

Then I spied the lady I had been looking for – the seller of a dark and evil-looking aubergine dip with overtones of smoke and spice that everyone in my family finds irresistible. She easily sold me the large $8 tub instead of the smaller one by assuring me that the dip keeps for two months in the fridge.

She leaned forward and whispered a recipe into my ear, directing me next toward the ruddy-cheeked mushroom grower in the adjacent stall to her. He convinced me to buy 2 pounds instead of just 1 by telling me something I've wanted to know for years: how to keep mushrooms from going mushy. His secret: Put them in a brown paper bag, fold it over and put the paper bag into a plastic bag before putting the whole package into the fridge. If the mushrooms are fresh, he swears this method keeps them useable for two weeks.

Between the two of them – the eggplant lady and the mushroom man – I had the perfect two-minute appetizer for a dinner party.

By this time, our bags and baskets overflowed with produce, and some growers had already taken down their big umbrellas. Sellers who didn't want to truck their produce home with them slashed prices, and we purchased armloads of fresh flowers at less than half price – lilies, snapdragons, iris, statice, campanula – all in my favorite shades of pink and purple. The pretty, dark-eyed teenager wrapping the bouquets in newspaper handed each of us a sunflower as we walked away.

Oh, no. The caramel corn. We had to walk right past it to get to the parking lot. "Please!" the children begged.

"Of course, of course, of course," I said, and we stood watching the popcorn maker. He pulled a welder's mask over his face and stirred the spattering, open cauldron with a three-foot-long paddle. At least an inch of popped corn crunched underfoot, and the swarthy young men shoveling the sweet popcorn into plastic bags could barely keep up with demand.

However, we soon walked off with our own pillow-sized bag of caramel corn – and big smiles on our faces. Smiles big enough to last till next Sunday.

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