Gourmet‘s death by 1,000 blogs

Did food blogs kill Gourmet? That’s Jenni Yabroff’s theory on Newsweek‘s Pop Vox blog. Yabroff essentially argues we are a nation of Julie Powells who aren’t really interested in reading the writings of a bunch of Julia Childs, at least in magazine form:

If the popularity of food blogs is any indication, our current vision of ourselves, as preparers and consumers of meals, is not as kitchen pros who can magically make the complicated look effortless, but as bumbling amateurs who can miraculously pull together a meal that actually tastes good.

It raises the issue of how we see and talk about food. Because while Gourmet wasn’t the center of the food discussion, it represented an ideology that may no longer have a champion.

“Gourmet, like all food magazines, was more about the way we think about food than about the way we actually prepare and eat it,” writes Yabroff.