Why Gourmet mattered.

By now, everyone who’s anyone in the food world has opined on the closing of Gourmet. It’s sad, true. But that’s almost more from an historical perspective — 69 years is a pretty impressive run — than its current standing in the world of food. In this Twitter-Food Network-Chowhound era, did anyone wait breathlessly for the latest issue of Gourmet — or any other magazine?

What I’ll miss: Barry Estabrook’s pieces on the politics of food, especially one tracing  the e coli outbreak in spinach and its results.  And the travel articles (unfortunately few of late).

What I won’t miss: Although Gourmet always looked stylish, the design changes veered so wildly that beyond the pretty cover, it was hard to tell sometimes what you were looking at. And I particularly disliked the photographs of farmers over the last years who seemed to be purposedly “dirtied up” to match somebody’s notion of agricultural reality (this is done elsewhere and it’s sooo annoying. As though everyone  in rural areas neglects to wash their hands or faces when a photographer shows up.)

And the A-Z redesign with copious recipes recently looked like a last-ditch panic — which I guess it was.

Connecting the dots between food and our larger world was the greatest service of Gourmet. That blurred sometimes when the fattest issues seemed to only trumpet the excesses of restaurant extravagance or the thinnest only comfort food. But by knitting together travel, food memory, the restaurant world, and food politics, Gourmet could make a statement and do it stylishly. 

I’ll keep as many issues of Gourmet as I have room for — I’ve saved holiday issues for ideas and recipes for decades, and often refer or find old issues when I travel. In a Food Network magazine era, that information and that style unfortunately won’t be matched.