Italian Milk Pie and the Hobby Fad 🥛
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start wasting time is the kitchen, using paintings as cookbooks and learning that the sweetest date you can have doesn't necessarily involve another person
Hi there!
I hate Septembers that feel like Januarys on steroids. But here we go again.
People, please.
Piero
✹Laura Esquivel, Between Two Fires.
Eat like an Artist
Seventy still life paintings. Seventy vegetarian recipes born from them. Gavin doesn't reconstruct the canvases but almost reads them: color, mood, composition, then a dish. With this you get an art book and a cookbook. A very giftable object.
The Still Life Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes Inspired by Great Paintings by Paola Gavin
→ Shortplot: 🎨 🍎 🥬 🎃
When did hobbies became a status symbol?
Let me rewrite the headline for you. When did hobbies became a status symbol? Short answer: since we spent days over other people's social media where they show off their beautiful lives.
Look closer and you'll notice it too. There's a new way to brag. It's not just money anymore. It's hobbies.
Rappers flash gold watches and logos in every frame. A friend corners you for an hour about tannins, fresh off one beginner sommelier class. Someone else mentions their weekly theater nights. Another wakes up at dawn to run, then tells you about it before you've had coffee. Someone learned Hangul during their commute to horseback riding lessons.
This picked up speed after the pandemic. Maybe remote work gave people more time to optimize. But I don't think that's the whole story.
Trend analysts have a cleaner explanation. The real luxury right now isn't a thing. It's a niche interest, a daily habit, knowing a lot about a little. The opposite of luxury is the latest iPhone, dupe culture, walking around head to toe in logos like you're dressed as an F1 driver.
Hobbies are cool again for one simple reason. You can carry a fake Birkin. You can't fake a hobby (not yet, anyway, but someone will find a way).
So here we are. A wave of handmade gifts. Retreats. Ski seasons. Book clubs. Archival fashion. Vintage finds dug out of flea markets and forgotten shops. All of it signals the same thing: I have taste, and taste takes time.
What does this have to do with food?
Everything, actually. Taste has gone flat. Everyone buys the same brands, eats at the same three restaurants that Instagram told them to try, orders the same natural wine. When something goes mainstream, it loses value. Fast.
The old question was: what can you afford? The new question is: what do you actually understand?
That shift could make us more human. It rewards curiosity over spending power. It asks us to know things, not just own things.
Unless it's just another pose. Another way to perform for the feed. Another scheme dressed up as self-improvement, built to get envy instead of connection.
🎤Lily Allen greatest meal starts with a couple of chicken liver parfait toasts in Notting Hill 🪥Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand and other strange habits to rewire your brain 🥄5 Sauce Secrets to Steal From the Restaurant of the Year 🧘Cortisol mocktails (★recipes) are still a thing🍹How to get drunk without alcol (hint: use the right infuse) 🥬Georgian Spinach Pkhali, a walnut-heavy Georgian spinach dish (★recipe) 🍜My Japanese serie binge-watching brought me to this Pork Meatball and Vermicelli Soup (★recipe) 🥛Italian Milk Pie looks like a lighter Basque cheesecake (★recipe) 🍮No Bake Date Caramel Mousse Cups give you the opportunity have dessert and make a pun, you just need to have a partner (★recipe) ☕Tech Bro DHH says that the Louisiana Cafe is the best spot to have lunch in Copenhagen 🍆And the award for the best headline essay goes to: Outside of dick and stress, what can a man provide?
Does ice-cream have a future in the age of wellness fads and weight-loss drugs?
Kitty Drake / The Guardian
The article captures a rare moment where a hundred-year-old industry is forced to reinvent itself almost overnight, not by a rival product, but by a pharmaceutical one. Ozempic-class drugs are reshaping food company strategy the way streaming reshaped film.
