Eat Things You Peel, Not Things You Unwrap 🍌
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to reckon that splendor is a fruit, butter is better, and the opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhood
Hi there!
Two phrases stuck with me in the last 24 hours, and both made me rethink how I eat every day.
The first: what grows together goes together. Tomatoes and basil, apples and cinnamon, whatever's in season sharing the same soil and the same weather. It's intuitive, isn't it? So when do we lose something by ignoring it? I think it's whenever we reach for imported asparagus in December instead of whatever's actually ripe outside. The dish still works, technically. But it's missing the logic that made the combination obvious in the first place.
The second: to eat healthy, eat things you peel, not things you unwrap. That one I understand completely. Whether I can actually live by it is another question (thank God there's a whole pantry of jarred stuff waiting for the day I fail!).
Piero
✹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (Água Viva).
I'm butter now
I haven't read "The Butter Cookbook" yet, so take this with a grain of salt, or a knob of butter. Monica Cavarzan grew up on a dairy farm, then went on to found Lard Ass, an artisan cultured butter producer in Australia. Her debut book promises history, religion, economics, and 30 recipes, all in service of one ingredient she's spent a decade obsessing over. If this book is even half as rich as its subject, what more could we possibly want?
The Butter Cookbook: A complete guide to the ultimate ingredient by Monica Cavarzan
→ Shortplot: 🐄 🥛 🧈 💛
What Shake Shack's Founder Gets Right About Getting Things Wrong
Danny Meyer once handed his assistant Jenny an acronym for sorting his inbox: TRAF, trash, refer, act, file. She pushed back. She wanted a fifth bin: Spark, for anything that lit up his imagination even off-script. He said yes. That's the whole Danny Meyer method in one hallway exchange.
A system. A person smart enough to break it. A founder secure enough to let her.
Meyer is the guy behind Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack, the burger kiosk that somehow became a public company with 700-plus locations in 24 countries.
His new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, is less a victory lap than a ledger of mistakes: frozen fries turned fresh turned frozen again, a tipping experiment that blew up in his face, a juice bar chain nobody asked for.
If you run a restaurant, or dream of one, or just love eating in them enough to notice when the ketchup station is a mess, this book is less about burgers and more about how culture survives growth without curdling into bureaucracy.
The real lesson isn't "don't fail". It's that failure, examined honestly and often publicly, is how you find out what your culture actually is, as opposed to what you hoped it was on a nicer day.
🔬 You've watched The Love Hypothesis, now you cook pizza with Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman (and here is where Tom gets his pie in London) 😱I Never Wash My Towels Once a Week (spoiler: don't count how much time goes by between washes, but how many times you used each towel) 🍟An updated list of cheap, good places to eat in Madrid 😵The database that we needed: enter the name of a species to see who it eats, or who eats it 🍁Cozy activities to try this fall based on your Zodiac 🫙‘They smell of urinal cakes!’: 100 unusual crisp flavours, ranked
Garlic, the poor man’s spice
Anca L. Szilágyi / Orion Magazine
Garlic as class marker, vampire repellent, Jewish stereotype, and family obsession. A wandering essay that moves from Provence to a 1980 documentary to Marcella Hazan, landing on one verdict: lovers of garlic far outnumber haters.
+Evergreen bonus read: when Did All the Recipes Get ‘Garlicky’?
The opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhood
Garrett Bucks / The White Pages (thanks to Dense Discovery)
Not about AI doom. It's about the tech titans warning us of it while treating us with contempt, and why anger isn't the point. The real answer to their apocalypse talk is showing up for each other: potlucks, flyers, neighbors who know your name.
