Dear Bon Appetit Magazine:

Ever since I started working for a gourmet store three years ago, my relationship with food has changed. I am now faced with a wide variety of luxurious or rare or rich food choices which I never paid much attention to before. I have been a subscriber to your magazine for almost twenty years. In the past I always managed to cook from at least one of your recipes each month. But now that I work at the gourmet store, not only do I not have the available time I used to, but I can buy just about anything I like already made up and just heat it and eat it when I got home. I felt guilty because I was getting your magazine and not cooking from it, even though the ingredients for your recipes are usually there in the store.

My little, cluttered kitchen bears no resemblance to the beautiful cooking places you show in your magazine. I can't afford to eat in most of the restaurants you review. I will never get to the exotic or elegant resorts and foreign countries which you present in your articles. I do not have the facilities to entertain guests on the lavish scale revealed in your pages. I'm not even sure that these parties and places are real, with real people. They certainly don't resemble me or any of my friends.

I finally decided to let my subscription lapse, after all those years, because I felt that I was not doing your magazine justice and was not using it. But I have found that I miss it. Even if I don't use your recipes, I learn about food combinations by reading through them, and I can suggest interesting ideas to the customers at the store. Even if I'll never experience the luxuries in your magazine, I can enjoy the fantasy, as well as the beautiful photographs. Maybe that's what Bon Appetit is really about, in the end: not a guide to actual kitchen work, but a fantasy about what life could be like for dreaming readers.

Having thought it out, I have decided to re-subscribe to Bon Appetit. I will enjoy it without obliging myself to work with it. Much of my tasting will be "virtual," rather than real. I will dine at tables of imagination, not just my own crumb-covered kitchen table. And maybe someday I will actually make that red wine pot roast with porcini mushrooms.

Posted at 3:13 am | link