If you were saddened by the demise of Gourmet magazine, and more recently of Saveur, there is some hopeful news: Saveur has gone “indie” and is returning to print! The new owners are charging closer to what the magazine is worth, $25/issue plus postage, initially publishing 2 issues per year. This follows the model of magazines like Fare and Eaten (I subscribe to both).
I hope this is a success, as so many print magazines have failed for one reason or another. Most other food magazines aren’t worth my money; after Gourmet was shut down the years’ worth remaining of my Gourmet subscription were transferred to Bon Appetit, but that magazine doesn’t hold a candle to Gourmet in terms of the writing quality and content (and Bon Appetit tries SO hard to be au courant it’s laughable) and when the issues ran out I refused to resubscribe.
Sounds a bit like Ed Behr’s The Art of Eating, although that was more of a journal. If vinyl record are now all the rage, maybe there’s hope for more high-quality print magazines like this in the years to come.
The Art of Eating is definitely more like a journal than a typical magazine. It’s great though! I think I have most of the early issues which were more like newsletters.
A couple of nicely produced food-focussed magazines are Fare https://www.faremag.com/ (food of one city at a time–the next issue is Mexico City) and Eaten https://eatenmagazine.com/ (food history). These are also published every few months and run around $20 per issue (plus shipping). I also like the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposia on Food (most years’ proceedings are available to read on line at no cost), and Gastronomica (University of California).
On the whole, I think yes–contributors are more international, topics are varied and interesting, but I haven’t yet had time to read the issue properly (in the past this was a magazine that I would read cover to cover). On first glance it seems that the length of the feature articles (including articles on Palenque, Colombia, veal, and Nara artisans) is shorter than in the past, but I’ll have to pull out an old issue to compare. I have all of the original Saveur issues, so for now will continue with the subscription.
Fare magazine is holding a sale, 20% off until 7 April with code FARESPRING20. Latest issue is on Mexico City. A collection of all 14 issues (2 per year) is available.