Immunity Soda and Kinky Bites 🥕
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to serve meals drawing inspiration from Russian film makers and Internet subcultures, while dreaming about healthy drinks and sandwiches with pickles replacing the bread
Hi there!
Have you ever heard about the Kuleshov Effect?
It is simple: show an actor's neutral face, then cut to a bowl of soup—the audience sees hunger. Same face, cut to a coffin—they see grief. Same face, cut to a child playing—they see tenderness.
The face never changes, but we create meaning from what comes before and after it. Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov proved this a century ago through his famous editing experiment.
Cooks understand this instinctively. A piece of grilled fish is just protein until you decide what sits beside it. Pair it with lemon and capers, it tastes bright and Mediterranean. Same fish with miso and ginger becomes something else entirely. The main ingredient doesn't change—the context does.
But the real magic happens at the table. That fish, those sides, that specific plate—they all transform again depending on who's across from you. The same meal tastes different when you're eating alone versus celebrating with someone whose presence changes the flavor of everything.
We think we're tasting the food, but we're tasting the edit: the sequence of flavors, the composition of the table, the montage of faces and voices around us.
Cinema taught us that meaning lives between the cuts. Cooking teaches us the same about combination.
Both reveal something deeper: we're creatures who can't experience anything in isolation. We need the before and after, the this-next-to-that, to make sense of the world.
Piero
✹ Ali Hazelwood, Mate. Ok, here we're talking about vampires and werewolves, but a good bite is a good bite, isn't it?
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Sometimes, while looking for news about food and cooking, taste and creative ways to stay together I stumble upon sexy stuff. Sometimes this stuff is way farer that simply sexy, but it may be interesting.
That's why today I'm serving you this Harper's essay: The Goon Squad: corn’s next frontier. "Corn" is - as you must imagine - a placeholder for another word. 🔞
The thesis. A generation raised on unlimited internet corn has spawned "gooners"—men who enjoy themselves for hours in elaborate home setups, chasing a transcendent state they call the "goonstate".
They've built an entire subculture around it: Discord servers with tens of thousands of members, competitive corn-trading games, and in-person meetups. Writer Daniel Kolitz dove deep into their world to understand how we got here—and whether the rest of us are really that different.
Ok, where's the food in it?
The gooners' relationship with corn almost mirrors our modern relationship with food delivery apps and cooking content.
Just as they've replaced actual intimacy with an endless buffet of hyperstimulating videos, we've replaced the slow ritual of cooking with DoorDash dopamine hits and TikTok recipe voyeurism we'll never actually make.
Both substitute messy, effortful reality with algorithmically optimized simulation. The gooners just reached the terminal point first.
So—are we all gooners now?
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Selling baby food and the American dream
Gillian Goodman / Dirt
Behind the glossy baby food commercials lies a carefully manufactured world where dinosaur kale gets rejected for looking too menacing and organic sugar gets sprinkled on purées to guarantee that perfect "bite and smile." A former advertising creative reveals the mechanical process of casting babies across continents, constructing aspirational families, and selling products worth millions—all built on our collective fears rather than our authentic desires.
