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Why Alison Arnett Won’t Miss Gourmet

Alison Arnett is not weepy about the passing of Gourmet. “In this Twitter-Food Network-Chowhound era, did anyone wait breathlessly for the latest issue of Gourmet — or any other magazine?” she wrote on Romancing the Diner yesterday. The former Globe food critic will miss “Barry Estabrook’s pieces on the politics of food… and the travel articles.” She will not miss, well, pretty much everything else.

Among Arnett’s litany of complaints: “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… 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.”

Why Gourmet Mattered. [Romancing the Diner]

Why Alison Arnett Won’t Miss Gourmet