The End of Gourmet

The last Gourmet Magazine came today, and my husband is so traumatized that he can't even look at it for more than a few pages at a time.

I find this remarkably odd.

He never cooks. When I'm out of town he either eats cereal or toast or just has someone else make him dinner...at a restaurant.

But something about Conde Nast's cancellation of Gourmet has completely unnerved him.

I admit he liked to pour over every issue. It is--was--a pretty magazine. He'd spend time when it came, savoring whatever he savored and that was it. He rarely referred back to it or asked, three weeks later, for that rabbit cassoulet he read about.

Nor does he like to travel. The magazine was a trove of travel ideas, what to see, what to eat, where to go. But he hates to leave his house. In fact, when he does travel, he takes his house with him...his RV is a dear friend.

So I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why the demise of Gourmet has given him such a wallop.

Too much a sign of the times?

Perhaps. But I can't say he's one of those high life kind of guys. His favorite pastime is digging in the dirt. Seriously. One of his proudest (and, secretly, most enjoyable) achievements is the rain trench he dug around the shrub beds in the front and side of the house. When it rains he likes to go out on the porch and make sure those sunken alleyways are doing the job the way they were engineered to do. So it's not like he was managing a hedge fund or drinking Cristal and downing caviar while Rome burned.

But Si Newhouse struck a nerve, I guess.

God, it's a cold cruel world.

This Sunday in the NY Times Magazine, Ruth Reichl, the editor--former editor--of Gourmet did the one-page interview. Asked to predict the fate of another Conde Nast publication, The New Yorker, Ruth predicted that magazine would be around forever. Evidently, Si "loves" that mag.

Not my baby boy. He canceled our subscription to The New Yorker months ago. With Gourmet on the other hand, we had to wait to be dumped.

That's us. Always right in front of the trend.