On the contrary, the ramen piece in Panorama presents a recipe uniquely, as only print could: the subject is broken down into a flow chart stretching across a fat canvas, a visual tour balancing technical advice with asides of cultural interest and plenty of lovely photos. The result is something I -- though assuredly not everyone -- would put on my fridge, or even consider preserving more permanently. Panorama is an extreme, a reaction in some sense to circumstances that have crippled the viability of newspapers, but borrowing the ideas it presents and applying them -- something David Eggers himself encouraged in a November 24th Chronicle article I read online -- could spawn practical possibilities for food journalism. What if recipes, for starters, came in the form of sumptuous full-page eye-feasts, perhaps just one every week? Initially, the cost might be prohibitive, but then it might catch on, and people might see such an evolution as both useful and aesthetically pleasing. Advertising might follow suit. Cooking is easier when you don't have to squint or handle a mouse with butter-caked hands. Recipes shared like this could be things to collect and cherish.

In the article referenced above, Eggers sums up the mission:

"It is our unorthodox belief that the Web and the newspaper can coexist, but that physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience."

In a blog-appropriate aside, Deborah Solomon interviewed Jeffrey Bezos, the Amazon.com bigwig, in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, and Bezos held forth at length on Kindle, the company's best-selling electronic reader. Bezos described wrapping his own in a one-gallon zip-lock bag in order to read in the bathtub. As he pointed out, you can't turn pages through a zip-lock bag. True, but can a Kindle (or a laptop for that matter) swat a mosquito or double as an umbrella in a pinch? I don't think so.

Unlike a book, electronic or otherwise, a newspaper is not built to last more than a day or two -- the lifespan of a mosquito, I've been told. When it's finished, it's recycled. Yet, when an issue contains something deemed worth saving -- a story with personal or historical importance -- a portion is clipped and set aside. Because most newspaper articles are archived online, this sort of active contribution to one's memory of history happening is rarer now, but it still endures. Moms and dads at least have not forgotten how to use scissors and affix stamps to envelopes bulging with snipped articles. While I don't imagine anyone will want to cut it up, Panorama still feels like a very big bow to that habit, like a gilded, gold-plated super-paper destined for a prime permanent spot on dusty bookshelves around the world -- an artifact, evidence, something to last.

A little over a year ago, the morning after Barack Obama's election to the presidency, vendors rapidly sold out of newspapers across the city. After work that day, I fished a rumpled, stained copy of the Examiner out of a BART station garbage bin. At home, I slid it into a manila envelope to stash away. On the walk home, as I saw rows of empty racks outside the corner stores I passed, I wondered: were people buying up newspapers to save for themselves and their families or to seal up in plastic and sell on Ebay for small profits decades down the line? Regardless of the intent, the fact newspapers were bought testifies not only to the significance of the occasion but to the persisting importance of the written word in, as Eggers put it, physical form. Recipes and explorations of culinary trends don't have to be as powerful or valuable as the stories and pictures inseparable from that moment in history to still be worth saving. The form just needs to become more palatable. This is a blog. If these words were appearing in print, I would arrange this differently, maybe write better, certainly with more focus and greater attention to detail -- ironically, with posterity in mind.

Places to buy San Francisco Panorama.

RELATED POSTS AND PROGRAMS ON KQED.ORG

Review by Danielle Sommer in KQED Arts Literature:
Extra! Extra! (Literally): SF Panorama

KQED Radio: Forum with Michael Krasny -- 'San Francisco Panorama'
Tue, Dec 8, 2009 -- 10:00 AM

panoramapanorama

McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama