by JULIET WATERS

Most journalists at the Blue Metropolis festival, I suspect, are going to ask Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet Magazine, about the March issue devoted to Montreal. But like most Montrealers, I didn’t manage to snag a copy before the issue completely sold out. Out of town journalists are probably going to focus on her new book, Garlic & Sapphires, a memoir of her years as the chief restaurant critic for the New York Times. I love and hate restaurant reviews as much as any normal Montrealer, and Reichl’s book is a totally fun gossipy read about the restaurant and journalism scene. But time was short so I stuck to a subject closer to my bookish heart.

Mirror: How much did you edit David Foster Wallace’s essay on lobster that he wrote for Gourmet?

Ruth Reichl: Oh barely. Barely at all.

M: Really? Because I found it so much more reined in than the rest of his writing, so I’m curious.

RR: Well he seemed to feel that it was edited a lot. We had one enormous fight, he and I, about something that I just wouldn’t put in the magazine, which he hasn’t forgiven me for. But, I mean, it was really long. It ran at 7,000 words and the original might have been, uh, 10,000 words. So we did have to take some out. And he wasn’t happy about it. On the other hand, he was happy enough about it to call his entire collection Consider the Lobster.

M: Yeah, it definitely seemed to me the most disciplined essay he’s ever written.

RR: Well, it was one of those things. I think he’s just used to having his stuff run as is. But he argues over every comma. I mean—literally—every comma. But to me one of the great things about a magazine—and magazines everywhere—is that it is the last bastion of serious editing. Books don’t get edited the way magazines do. It’s the kind of thing where a group of us will sit around in a room and argue. And I have to tell you, when that piece of David Foster Wallace’s came in, I truly was terrified. I mean, in retrospect, we were stupid not having thought about what he was going to find when he went to the Maine Lobster Festival. But it hadn’t occurred to me that we were going to get a piece on bioethics. And I truly was prepared for people to cancel their subscriptions in droves and say, you know, “I don’t buy Gourmet magazine to read about what lobsters feel when they get plunked into boiling water.” On the other hand, being faced with it, I mean that’s the thing about being an editor. You send this terrific writer out to do something and he gives you something that is better than anything you had any right to expect, and more important—truly heartfelt—and then you have to run it, even though you know it’s going to be really controversial.

M: But you’ve always been pretty sensitive to the politics of food, so I’d be surprised if your core readers would dump you.

RR: We got hundreds, literally hundreds of letters and they were 10–1, “Thank you for writing this” and then every 10th letter was, “Are you insane to do this to your readers?” But yeah, one of the things I feel really good about since I’ve been at Gourmet is that we’ve taken a magazine that never, ever thought about the politics of food and we have something in just about every issue that deals with issues of hunger and genetic modification and the politics of food—you know, it’s my really strong-held belief that today, if you’re a passionate cook, you really have to know what’s going on in the food system. It’s just something that we can’t really ignore anymore. And it felt really good that readers have come with us.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl, The Penguin Press, hc, 334pp, $36