Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,68

get one of those stinging assessments your children are uniquely equipped to deliver.

“I think you’re underestimating your readers. Give them some credit.”

It was 2004—and that article changed everything. Two people canceled their subscriptions, but hundreds wrote in to say how much they valued a magazine that published such thought-provoking articles. “Keep it up” was the basic message.

And we did. It was DFW who gave me the courage to publish “Some Pig,” David Rakoff’s extremely controversial piece on the tortured relationship between Jews and bacon. Would I have dared, before DFW, to publish “The Taste of Home,” Junot Díaz’s essay about how his love for Asian food is inextricably linked with his yearning for his absent father? Probably not. And I’m pretty sure that before DFW I would have run, fast, in the other direction when I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Too Hot to Handle,” a feminist food piece about growing up in Africa. Every one of these articles took food writing into a deeply personal, psychological direction, and every one of them was edgy and uncomfortable. But DFW had proved that our readers appreciated a challenge, and we were all eager to stretch the traditional boundaries of food writing.

I’ll admit that on first reading I was frightened of Nina Teicholz’s deeply troubling investigation into the food industry’s thirty-year attempt to sabotage a scientist who’d discovered a link between trans fats and cancer. “These two guys from the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils—the trans fat lobby, basically—visited me,” the scientist recalled, “and, boy, were they angry. They said they’d been keeping a careful watch to prevent articles like mine from coming out in the literature and didn’t know how this horse had gotten out of the barn.”

Great story. Also problematic. Procter & Gamble, the company that held the first patent for trans fats, was one of Condé Nast’s biggest advertisers. I remembered Florio talking about Si’s fury when a fashion editor angered a major advertiser. Would he fire me for this? We called Nina’s story “Heart Breaker” and waited to see what would happen. (We never heard a word from P&G.)

And when Barry Estabrook said he wanted to go to Florida to investigate the plight of tomato pickers, once again I thought of DFW. The cut line on “The Price of Tomatoes” went like this: “If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.”

I had nightmares about every one of those pieces. But in those sleepless nights while we were editing the David Foster Wallace piece, I’d learned an important lesson: When something frightens me, it is definitely worth doing.

NO TRUMPETS SOUNDED. NO ALARMS blared. The bland piece of paper sailed onto our desks disguised as a routine memo: Florio was being named vice chairman. We all knew he was being kicked upstairs, but did any of us understand that this marked the end of life as we knew it?

I certainly did not. I was like a frog in a kettle of water and this was the moment they lit the fire, turning it up so gradually I had no suspicion that Gourmet would soon be cooked. If you’d told me that the end was near, I wouldn’t have believed you. Halcyon times still lay ahead, but even later, when the pot was being stirred, I never really felt how hot the water had become.

That memo wrenched Florio out of Si’s orbit, and he faded slowly from the scene until, like the Cheshire Cat, nothing but the grin remained. As his influence evaporated, the exuberant company he’d created vanished with it, the manic energy replaced by something sterner, sturdier, and far more predictable.

“This is going to be good” is what I thought when I first met the man who stepped into the office next to Si’s. Chuck Townsend projected solid reliability. With pale-blue eyes and windburned cheeks, he was an upscale version of every Elk and Shriner in the nation, and as I watched him consume a bland white-bread lunch, I thought back to the strange and ebullient Florio meals. Things would be calmer now, I thought, more sane, more sober.

I was optimistic as I watched Chuck, the commander of the New York Yacht Club, pilot us away from the casual accounting of Steve’s stewardship. But I did not reckon on the cost, did not know this would mean spending endless hours attending to the business of the magazine. Meetings that had once