Virtue With a Touch of Gloss

Eating Well is back. For those of us unaware that it had gone anywhere, or what it was in the first place, Eating Well is a magazine. Launched in 1990, its target readers were what the publishers estimated were 77 million aging baby boomers with the means to give dinner parties, but suddenly conscious enough of their mortality to worry that a rich souffle might be their last.

Eating Well would take the fashionable dishes of the day and put them through a nutritionist’s sieve. There would be stories about the food industry and feverish food politics of the day. It would be the thinking hypertensive’s alternative to the glossy Cooking Light.

Turning counterculture instincts to a diet magazine for the ascetic intelligentsia was the idea of James Lawrence, a journalism major out of Cornell and Syracuse universities and a former Peace Corps volunteer. By the late 1980s, Lawrence was a Vermont-based publisher of several lifestyle periodicals. Eating Well was developed just as the Canadian publishing group Telemedia purchased 85% of Lawrence’s company. In July 1990, Lawrence rolled out a premier issue packed with the kind of upscale ads usually attainable only by established publishers.

There were high hopes for the new food magazine’s market mix. The original editor, Barry Estabrook, promised the New York Times that he would “treat food as serious journalism.”

The “charter issue” certainly had attitude. The typeface was a stylish spin on Rolling Stone Roman. There was interesting white space along with Magritte-style illustrations and a formidable procession of writing and cooking talent, including chef Rick Bayless, authors Martha Rose Shulman and Darra Goldstein.

There was a visit to Robert Mondavi’s kitchen and a cracking piece of reporting traced a rockfish caught in the Pacific then sold as a red snapper in Des Moines eight days later.

The magazine was decreed groundbreaking and sophisticated by the national press.

As the months rolled on, the prominent names kept coming. Corby Kummer celebrated Alice Waters and authentic French cookery.

The magazine aimed at money. There were glossy ads for dream kitchens. But look closely, and the theme was using those deluxe rooms to drain the fat out of food. Yogurt was never simply yogurt, but always low-fat or non-fat versions.

By November, the magazine was carrying recipes for eggless mayonnaise, reinventing trifle with skim milk and cornstarch, and promoting a dehydrated egg substitute called “EggZact.”

But these were strange times, and the formula was working. Vanquishing calories was a politically correct activity, good housekeeping was suddenly a cause. Washington lobbyists were sending out press releases concerning proper hand-washing and chopping-board maintenance instructions.

However, as successful as his magazine was, trouble arrived for the founder within six months. “There was a shake-up at the top of Telemedia,” says Lawrence. “I was soon invited to leave.”

But the staff stayed and the magazine carried on much as he had envisioned it for the next five years, he says. Circulation peaked at more than 600,000. Calculating how many copies got passed along, total readership was estimated at 3 million.

But this was still far from Cooking Light’s 9.2 million. In 1997, a merger put the New York publishing group Hachette-Filipacchi in charge of Eating Well.

By April 1998, the old Rolling Stone Roman, interesting white space and big-name authors were gone. The magazine was no longer an alternative to Cooking Light, but a thin imitation. A cover done out in lime green and pink shrieked, “Lighten up!”

Inside, the lighteners were in overdrive--readers were offered smoked turkey breasts for Easter brunch. A souffle, described as a “puff,” called for nine eggs, but threw away seven of the yolks. There were “creamless” cream soups. Caesar salad dressing was approximated with low-fat cottage cheese and nonfat plain yogurt.

The new managers wanted young readers, says food editor Patsy Jamieson. This was not a logical audience for a magazine dedicated to careful eating, she contends: “Young people still eat out a lot; they still think they’re invincible, still bulletproof.”

By 1999, Eating Well’s ad sales were down, the readers ages were up and Hachette-Filipacchi folded the magazine.

But it was not quite dead. Early in 2001, Lawrence found the rights to Eating Well on the market as part of an Internet kitchenware company. He bought them and gathered a handful of the original staff--including Jamieson--to resurrect the magazine.

Starting Over

This time, however, it would not be bimonthly but quarterly. There would be no large corporate partners, no ad agencies, no advertisers offering dream kitchens. A skeleton staff worked six months for free. At launch, the old staff of 60 was down to more like 15 people, and the magazine that reportedly cost $12 million to develop in 1990 has been resuscitated for $750,000.

They are motivated, says Lawrence, by belief in their magazine and a bulletin board festooned with supportive e-mails from former subscribers. Messages include, “Why not charge as much as Saveur magazine charges? At least I can find the ingredients used in Eating Well!”

The new issue, labeled Vol. One, Number 1, is now arriving in stores--not to newsstands, not the kind with cigars, says Lawrence, and not airports, but in bookstores and health-food shops.

The old design flair is back, but in updated, elegant versions. There are features on portion sizes, about chili peppers, eating in Greece, veggie burgers and summer sorbets.

Deborah Madison is among the contributors and organic activist and Columbia University nutritionist Joan Gussow is on the advisory board.

The intent, says Lawrence in the editor’s introduction, is “to publish a magazine with authority, integrity and--at the right moments--an editorial funny bone.”

In the new Vol. One, a column called the “Healthy Skeptic” is the funny part, explains Jamieson. In this issue, the skeptic caricatures people who consume raw oysters or lick a cookie bowl as “XTreme” eaters.

If this doesn’t tickle everyone’s funny bone, there is merry eloquence to be found. A lovely feature, “My Greek Island Table,” by Greek American food-writer Diane Kochilas, could have shone in the lush “charter issue” 12 years ago. In it, Kochilas describes life in Christos, a village on the island of Ikaria, where shops open when it’s cool. “You can buy shoes and sugar at midnight, but not at 9 in the morning,” she writes. The food comes straight from the land and tradition. It is consumed with great festivity. Kochilas provides recipes for butterflied leg of lamb, potato salad and filo pastries. Olive oil is measured by the cup, not the tablespoon. It is the best kind of food writing. It brings your own family to mind, then drives you to the phone to invite them over, then the kitchen to cook for them.

But elsewhere, the magazine is older, its lips are thinner and it is not amused. Getting to this evocative piece about a place where time stood still requires reading a number of articles about a place where tradition seems to consist of tumult: modern America.

It is like a voyage through a war zone, then a crime scene, then a hospital ward which concludes--somewhat disarmingly--in a high-class fat farm. Headlines in a health-minded section announce ways of “beating hypertension” with dairy products, “tracing dental decay to acidic beverages” and using vegetables as “nature’s aspirin.”

The foremost issue is fat. The magazine lives on the front line of the argument over how 60% of Americans got to be fat, 30% obese, and how to slim us all down again. The central interview with nutritionist and author of “Food Politics” Marion Nestle, laments that Uncle Sam is “no longer the lean, straight-talking icon of our memories” but someone who remains silent on the efforts of the food industry to overstuff us.

There is a chart showing the typical serving size of fries rose from the 1950 standard of 2 ounces to the present one of 6. While Uncle Sam didn’t set the size of McDonalds’ French fry packets, the interviewer and Nestle argue that he failed to issue categorical public warnings not to eat fries, at least very often.

Elsewhere, Eating Well is a straight-up cookery magazine, a provider of elegant dinner party recipes. As in the old days, nutritionists have taken largely classic recipes and conducted what they regard as healthful little switcheroos, usually reducing fat. So in a cherry crumble, most of the butter for the crust is replaced with canola oil and orange juice concentrate. The ice-cream topping is low-fat or, preferably, low- or no-fat frozen yogurt. There is an entire article dedicated to grilling skinless chicken breasts.

Not as Fearful of Fat

Lawrence insists that this is joyous, delicious food. Food that “intelligent” people eat. Moreover, it has gotten richer, says Jamieson. Their fear of fat has lessened as science has back-pedaled from much of the early condemnations of eggs and unsaturated fats.

“I think we did some silly things over the years,” says Jamieson, “or not silly, but with the knowledge we have now, we would do things differently.” Once they threw away egg yolks, she says. No more.

If Eating Well has fought for its survival, Cooking Light--owned by the media giant Time Warner--has gone from strength to strength. Its Los Angeles advertising office says readership has climbed from 9.2 million to just more than 10 million, almost twice that of Gourmet’s. It, too, nips the fat out of food (there’s cooking spray greasing the pan for the glazed ham). But, compare the current editions of the two magazines and one finds that where Eating Well is weighing the health benefits of food diet supplements derived from chili peppers, Cooking Light is urging us to exercise our inner child by rediscovering the hula-hoop.

They imagine themselves as attracting different readers. Eating Well wants NPR listeners. Cooking Light is going for “Oprah” watchers. But whoever they think we are, or what we want, neither magazine seems to trust us with real food, with the wit to eat whole yogurt, real milk or cream when we want something filling, and an apple when we want a light snack.

They prefer to teach moderation by denying us content in the first place. Whether this works, or just leaves us ravenous and rushing off to McDonald’s for some of those super-sized servings of fries, is anyone’s guess. Certainly abroad, good food is richer and the population is thinner.