Elegies for Gourmet, LA's Futile Fast-Food Ban, and Other Food News

The demise of Gourmet, announced Monday, continues to rock the food world. There are elegies everywhere you click and thousands of writers, as we always do, trying to make sense of the loss. One of the longtime writers for the LA Times adds some context, describing the evolution of the magazine over its 70 years. The Boston Globe offers a piquant (and, at least online, curiously byline-free) F-U to Gourmet, which it calls obsolete. And Ruth Reichl tells the New York Times about her future plans -- not surprisingly, they include a memoir about the mag. My heart goes out to the dozens of writers and editors who don't have such a thick cushion of celebrity to land on.

Seattle's own Langdon Cook, whose beautifully written book Fat of the Land is out right now, talks to Salon about how foraging is the logical extension of the local-foods movement and, speaking of logical extensions, how he's got to buy a gun and learn to hunt.

Jane Black at the Washington Post recounts the history of Old Bay Seasoning, invented 70 years ago by a spice merchant fired from McCormick and popularized 50 years later by the same company, which had acquired the brand. She also talks to addicts who won't leave Maryland without their fix.

Dan Mitchell over at Slate's Big Money blog is a real find -- his Daily Bread column covering the business of food has become a daily pleasure. Today, he reports on a study suggesting that Los Angeles's 2008 ban on new fast-food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods isn't going to affect residents' high obesity rates -- partially because these neighborhoods started out with fewer fast-food restaurants than richer, slimmer quarters of the city.

On a very different note, Nigel Slater, one of Britain's best food writers, comes up with a couple of recipes for all those green tomatoes in your garden that will never, never ripen. Really . . . it's time to give up on them.

Bonus link: Your ewwww story of the day.