Food Magazine Worth Reading

Most food magazines are mediocre.

There are a host of recipe-based ones that really don't offer much that you don't already have, if you have a decent cookbook library. Then there are the ones that are full of reviews of restaurants all over the country, which is great if you are on the road a lot. Some, like Gourmet do a good job of describing the food at those restaurants, so a creative cook can get some ideas from the reviews (Gourmet also has pretty good recipes overall).

I could easily do without the stack of food magazines that come in the mail box. I find that the only sometimes tedious part of the job of restaurant reviewer is having to stay current on food trends and kitchen gossip (although I still manage to avoid a lot of that - for instance, I really couldn't care less as to what Wolfgang Puck or Jeremiah Towers are up to). I also am always on the lookout for different ways of describing food, which is probably second only to sports writing in its difficulty. So, I read the food magazines, albeit reluctantly.

There is one, however, that I enjoy cover to cover. It is Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which is published by the University of California Press. As a semi-academic journal you do get the odd "you thought that X was good, but it is not. It is BAAAAAAAAD" sort of crap that is common in academia, but most of the articles, even the ones by cultural anthropologists, are pretty good, and the gems are really good.

For instance, if you go to the website, you can read a piece on the egg cream and the syrup racket in the 1930's (just the sort of thing that I can imagine reading about on Irish Elk). The cover price for Gastronomica is $10 per issue, which is steep, but it is a quarterly, and packs more content in a single issue than the advert-heavy food magazines pack in a year.

Also, they have great cover art, which earns big points from me. It is not a magazine for those looking for recipes (Cuisine at Home is the one I recommend for that), but it is one that should appeal to non-foodies as well as foodies and cooks.