Perhaps rapper Biggie Smalls said it best when he emceed, “It was all a dream, I used to read Gourmet magazine, Salt n’ Peppa and Heavy D up in the limousine.” Since its founding in 1941 and before its untimely demise last week, Gourmet was an inspiration to people of many walks of life: domestic shut-ins, patients waiting at the podiatrist’s office, food fanatics and people with way too much thyme on their hands.

Due to declining ad sales and superannuated readers who kept dying off, Gourmet struggled on life support for several years, before the people at Condé Nast made the gut-wrenching decision to pull the plug after the November issue. There was also some overlap in the demographic of Condé Nast’s other publications— namely Bon Appétit, also a monthly cuisine magazine, but one which lacks Gourmet’shard-hitting culinary instinct, an instinct responsible for such articles as “Politics of the Plate: Sweet Victory” (which was actually published earlier this year).

Perhaps no one exemplifies Gourmet’s mourners better than Brown Professor Coleen Williams. Hearing the news, she slammed down her mug of organic green tea on a rickety oak side-table and asked her domestic partner, Emily, who spent a year in Paris in the late 1970s smoking cigarettes and writing angry poetry at neighborhood cafes, what she thought of it all. Emily, wrapped in a red snuggie, slid up in her chair and stared at her partner over her reading glasses with astonished bewilderment.

“Where will I draw material for my lectures? How will I remain relevant?” wailed Prof. Williams, who currently teaches “Flambé This!: Feminism and the Kitchen Oppression.”

Then there are those who are glad to see the ol’ food rag serve its final offering. Chris Collard, a popular Evangelical figure from Springville Ut., has had a long-standing wrangle with Gourmet. Collard, with his wiry arms tightly folded against his overall-clad chest, denounced the magazine as “victual pornography,” and said that the suggestive and provocative dishes strewn across its glossy pages were corrupting children.

“First, Billy finds his Mom’s magazine under her apron or something, then he’s locking himself in the kitchen, staring at the pictures, insisting he’ll be ‘out in a minute.’ He should be out, out meeting real plates of food, having healthy eating habits. This sort of gratification is a sin against all that is holy!”

Gourmet Magazine, a controversial and thought provoking food-publication, will receive a mixed grieving as its last issue is published next month.