Gourmet, goodbye

Gourmetmagazineclosed For those who never filled a box with their belongings, for those who never had to remove photos or sheets from a wall, for those who have never had to leave a workplace that has become like a house, the closure of Gourmet, the bible of food and wine magazines in the world, means absolutely nothing.

But if you had to say goodbye to a desk that you considered your own one, if you have lost your job and with this not only your colleagues but some real friend, then the news is about you.
The global crisis and the consequent collapse of the advertising market has had many victims in the world, not only in Italy. Some newspapers have closed, others have only delayed their slow agony. Gourmet didn't make it and had to close.
But if journalism is a profession that never leaves you, then this goodbye need to be documented. So Kevin Demaria, art director of the newspaper, took pictures of Gourmet last days and he has published these shots in a blog, Last Days of Gourmet.
"I knew I had to document the place where I enjoyed working for the past 8 years." So the pictures focus on the full wastebasket, on the tidy desktops, on the empty spaces left on the walls, on the rooms empty and increasingly disorganized full of stacked boxes and on a few survivors in front of the computer. A perfect chronicle of recent months, in which so many people around the world have lost their jobs.
The news of the closure of Gourmet had already been given by New York Times, who had greeted with astonishment the end of a weekly magazine that survives from January 1941. American housewives will look through more carefully the latter number of the magazine that, thankfully, will help them with the Thanksgiving dinner. But many are wondering how to approach the upcoming holiday with no new suggestions. "It's an icon of American culture," said some advocates. The newspaper, however, will not disappear, and its archive will be donated entirely to the New York Public Library or at a university.
Meanwhile, the Gourmet Magazine facebook group began collecting complaints from readers who seek to understand if they can do something to reopen the magazine.
But Gourmet Magazine will not be out on newsstands, in December. And by that time, its readers will have start reading other magazines. Now, we just have to enjoy the poetry of these photo shoots, hoping that the economic crisis will stop to make victims.