Bright Ideas and Translucent Pears 🍐
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start baking, lowering the grocery bill, and cooking on a luxury yacht
Hi there!
Two ideas caught my attention this week, and you'll find them linked around in this issue.
The first is a reframe of the 1% concept — not the wealthy elite, but the tiny fraction of users who generate almost everything you see online. That loud, obsessive minority shapes what feels like "the conversation," even though it represents almost no one.
The second idea comes from veteran tech journalist Om Malik, via Dense Discovery newsletter (a very good one), and it's about velocity — the organizing principle that quietly replaced authority on the internet.
Malik's argument is structural, not moral. Nobody decided to make the internet worse. Platforms built systems that reward speed above everything else, and rational people — writers, reviewers, newsrooms — responded accordingly. First takes win. Best takes arrive too late.
And here's where the two ideas connect: when 1% of users produce the content, and the algorithm pays a premium for whoever speaks first, what we get isn't information. It's a freakshow running at full speed. Like a kitchen where only the microwave gets used — fast, convenient, and completely unable to develop any real flavor.
Different paths, I suppose.
Piero
PS: I have many microwave friends.
✹Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary. One of my favorite books ever, an outstanding scientific adventure, and – soon (March 20th) – a movie featuring Ryan Gosling.
Oh, sweetie
A hybrid memoir and cookbook for anyone who has ever found their way back to themselves through a kitchen. Fifty baking recipes woven into a coming-of-age story about desire, reinvention, and the hard-earned satisfaction of following a recipe all the way to the end. The author, Tanya Bush — co-founder of the James Beard-nominated Cake Zine and the mind behind the Instagram account @will.this.make.me.happy — makes dessert feel like the most honest form of self-expression there is.
Will This Make You Happy by Tanya Bush
→ Shortplot: 🍰 🍩 🍧 🤗
I'll have it vegan, with bacon on the side
Food – we know that — is rarely just fuel. It's identity, memory, ritual, blablabla — and when someone tells you to change what you eat, they're often asking you to rewrite a part of yourself.
That's why radical dietary shifts fail so often: they demand a complete conversion before you've even decided you believe.
Danielle Foré put it simply on Mastodon: "People often avoid making small positive changes because they get caught up in trying to go all the way" (this comes also from the latest Dense Discovery issue!).
Enters the "vegan + bacon framework", that is disarmingly simple (and that's precisely its strength). It doesn't ask you to be a different person. It asks you to try one thing. «“I could never go vegan. I love bacon too much”. So then go vegan plus bacon. Or vegetarian plus bacon».
The ethical tension is real, though. A purist would argue that half-measures normalize compromise — that eating one animal product still funds an industry you claim to oppose. Fair point. But pragmatism has its own ethics.
A million people reducing meat consumption by 30% likely does more measurable good than ten thousand going fully vegan and burning out by February. Small changes also do something radicals underestimate: they build identity slowly. And the direction matters more than the velocity.
PS: you can also make vegan bacon (★recipe)
🍎Should I Refrigerate Apples? And More Fruits and Vegetables Storage Questions, Answered 🥐Salt Bread Is Ready to Win Over the World (★recipe)💡Rumpelstiltskin Effect, The 1% Rule, Slopaganda and more: learn 26 Useful Concepts for 2026 Ideas to equip you for 2026 🎨Rituals of Famous Creative Women 🍷How to sum up Spanish wine in six glasses (none of them sherry) 🍦Why the world’s biggest food companies are ditching ice cream🍸The Smallest Bar in the World 💸I Lowered My Grocery Bill Using the Japanese Concept of “Mottainai” ✊This is on the political side, but interesting: 7 reasons why hosting a silly little potluck (or game night, or porch hang, or book club, or group hike) is essential to defeating fascism
Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why
Om Malik / OM
This is one of the best reads of this 2026 yet. The piece argues that the internet's real damage isn't misinformation — it's structural: velocity replaced authority as the organizing principle of information. What makes it sharp right now is that AI is about to accelerate that same dynamic, flooding every feed with content that costs nothing to produce and even less to ignore. The author doesn't moralize; he maps the infrastructure, which is the more honest and useful thing to do.
Bad Lunch
Mishele Maron / The Sun Magazine
A self-taught cook lands a job on a luxury Mediterranean charter yacht, serving ultra-wealthy clients who pay $30,000 a day and test the staff with lipstick marks on windows. The writing earns its keep through sharp class contrasts — food stamps in a trailer versus gold credit cards at Saint-Tropez — and a dry, unsentimental eye for the absurdity of serving the rich. What makes it compelling is the physical toll hidden beneath the glamour: burned fingers, sleepless nights, a storm in Sardinia, and a cook crawling through spilled stock on a tilting floor.
