The ambulance chaser

A week ago, Conde Nast announced that it is closing Gourmet magazine.

I am really, really not ok with this. Granted, in the last year, I have been a poor reader of the magazine, which arrived each month in its plastic wrap, a single luscious object on its cover, beautifully photographed: a green quince, a toasted cheese sandwich, a candied apple. I don't even like candied applies, but on the cover of Gourmet, the glistening red-lacquered sphere was spectacle of desire. Still, feeling overcommitted and overwhelmed, sometimes it felt like too much to boil a packet of ramen, let alone singe poblano peppers over a gas flame and peel. Reading Gourmet was no longer a refuge of culinary dreams but a reinforcing hammer blow to the skull: You are just too damned tired to do anything but watch another episode of Clean House on HGTV. At least at the end of that, someone's house is clean. After reading Gourmet, I was just hungry.

So now Gourmet is dead, and I have all these pristine issues in neat stacks all over the apartment, along with glossy shelter magazines [another mental oasis where the carpets are always white, there's never any dirty laundry, and the gardens are lushly immaculate], and my favorite Cheetos of all monthly periodicals--women's fashion magazines, which are purely and sublimely junk food for the brain. [I never worry how many pythons died so those clutch purses could live.] After I'm done with all the other magazines, I put stacks of them down in the laundry room, hoping someone else will read them. But I have all my Gourmets. When I lived in Williamsburg, I kept all ten years of them in cardboard folios and only under the panicked ruthlessness of moving was able to pitch them into the freight elevator and take them to the curb for recycling. Suddenly, the Gourmets are like museum objects, precious in their scarcity. I can go back and read the last two years, cycling through the seasons and pretending a new issue is arriving each month because I never read any of these to begin with.

Foodies everywhere mourned the end of an indulgent, often elitist practice. Julia Child had showed America how to love its food and take pleasure in the length and strenuousness of its preparation. We remembered how to value the raw ingredient; we wanted to read not only about how the flour was milled but also how the wheat was grown. Gourmet celebrated that love each month. It was the discipline and joy of performing a daily mundane act [cooking and eating] and discovering how it could be both art and worship.

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The death of Gourmet only reinforces that a certain kind of journalistic craft and life is over as well. It's shocking to realize that moment when one has actually become the peevish whiner in the room: "Well, I remember when . . . "

Only now do I realize how privileged I was to have studied journalism when it was still considered an honorable profession. Each day, we labored over ethical decisions. When I was just starting out in the '80s, the newsroom still was populated by men and women in their sixties and even seventies--people who had worked on newspapers during World War II and who had started out as copy boys. The back composing room of the Akron Beacon Journal was staffed almost entirely by men who were deaf; it was the kind of work that a man with a handicap could get in those days with no impact on their ability to do a proper job, unaided. When I'd walk back there, you could see them bent over the composing table, smoothing down waxed sheets of type with little rollers and then signing to one another.

When, as a college student, I got my first tour of the press room running at full speed, it was a thrill I have to this day: the adrenaline rush of watching the miles of newsprint--fragile in your hands--flying through the rollers at incredible speeds. Even at that velocity, the print would be crisp and each photo had to be a perfect register. If you were lucky, you'd happen to pass by when they replaced one giant roll of paper with another, all without stopping the press at all, a feat of levers and sheer wonder.

I love the newsroom and that way of doing journalism, even though I left it. I know I will miss it as a fixture, like a beloved city building torn down in the name of progress or field of wheat that is paved over for a subdivision. It becomes part of a historical past that we can never quite believe is not with us anymore.