Italian Punk & Christmas Cookies 🎄

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start baking surreal biscuits, spreading avocado on messy open sandwiches because - you know - nobody wants to be a foodie anymore

Hi there!

How's your binge-watching level these days?

I'm obsessed with Pluribus, in which a hive mind has taken over most of humanity, leaving only a few immune survivors navigating a world where individuality has become a rarity.

There's this Carol who refuses to be helped by the hive mind, but other immune survivors enjoy the pleasures of being served by this docile humanity.

When Carol visits Mr. Diabaté, an immune who is living a spoiled and rich life in Vegas, she transforms her breakfast plate into a messy open-faced sandwich—eggs, bacon, avocado stacked on toast in a spontaneous combination.

Mr. Diabaté, watches carefully, then mimics her, and in that moment discovers something he couldn't have asked his hive-mind servants to create: something he didn't know existed.

While this AI-like collective can only respond to prompts already known, this unscripted act reveals what algorithms miss. The Hive can list off all the ingredients and prepare the dish perfectly, but it will never recreate the experience—which gets at something Anthony Bourdain understood: the presentation of a dish is less important than how it tastes, and the taste is less important than the people with whom you're eating.

Diabaté's childlike delight at this accidental discovery suggests he's starting to feel the cost of his fantasy: a world where everyone says yes but no one can surprise you.

When we eat together, we don't just share meals—we share the unexpected.

Piero

✹Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count.

Shocking Italian

Vanja van der Leeden's Italopunk offers a fresh take on Italian cooking by dismantling culinary dogma while honoring tradition—her puttanesca integrale adds cream to the umami bomb, lamb replaces veal in spezzatino with mint labneh, and dishes like vodka carbonara and eggplant tarte tatin sit alongside profiles of new-wave trattoria chefs. Photographer Remko Kraaijeveld's gritty images reject postcard Italy, capturing instead hungry, beautiful people in raw, soul-baring snapshots that make the country's scruffy underbelly feel alive. The book reads like a culinary tour led by a fellow traveler who knows when to tweak a recipe, when to leave it untouched, and when to keep you guessing—proving that Italian cuisine deserves to evolve without losing its soul.

ItaloPunk by Vanja van der Leeden
→ Shortplot: 🍝 🇮🇹 🍕 🍗

Martin Parr and the Lies We Eat

Martin Parr died this week. He wasn't a food photographer—he was a documentarian of ordinary life who happened to find food everywhere he looked.

Beaches, supermarkets, tourist traps, street corners. Wherever people gathered, food appeared. And Parr's camera, armed with its signature ring flash, captured it all: the greasy, the garish, the gloriously fake.

In 1983, he abandoned black and white for saturated color. Why? "Because that's the language of commercial advertising." He wanted to speak the same dialect as the billboards and packages lying to us daily.

"If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it?", he said in a 2016 interview. "That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day".

While others chased culinary perfection, Parr shot what we actually ate. Duck feet in China, where people "eat anything with legs, minus tables". Chips and meat spreads. Junk food he'd photograph and then consume himself.

His daughter Ellen became a chef. She hosted dinners in Japan, London, and Germany where guests ate dishes based on her father's photographs. "It's surreal eating what I photograph", Parr said. The propaganda became real food, then became art, then became dinner.

Henri Cartier-Bresson called him alien. Some Magnum colleagues didn't understand his approach. But Parr knew what he was doing: "You can tell a lot about society, who we are and what we like doing, by looking at the food we eat."

He looked. He showed us. The gap between the package and what's inside was never just about food—it was about everything we're sold, everything we believe, everything we consume without questioning.

Parr's camera didn't flatter. It told the truth. In a world drowning in food porn, that was his most radical act.

🍊Rosalía's Cake, el bizchoco de 14 kilates (★recipe) 🎅🏻75 vegan and vegetarian Christmas ideas (★recipes) 🍪Striped Blue Sugar Cookies 🔪Is There a Better Way to Cut a Cake? 🙅🏻‍♂️What Your Breakfast Habits Say About Your Lifespan 🧘‍♀️My Three-Day Retreat in Total Darkness💡52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2025 (contains radioactive shrimps!) 🥐Lidl US just dropped Eau de Croissant 📚Meet a real cookbook collector 🤓OnlyRecipe, save and organize your favorite recipes from any website ☕️Japanese Jelly Coffee (★recipe) 🎄Make your house smell like Christmas 🍵Wait! There's a Kombucha horror movie out there 🌮French Dip Quesadilla (★recipe) 🍫Blitz a Chia-Chocolate mousse (★recipe) 🥣Soups vs. Inflammation (★recipes)

+

You can stay here or you can go to YouTube and follow my favorite food special of the year: The New York Times' Cooking Cookie Week. Now featuring: Dark 'n' Stormy Cookies, Vietnamese Coffee Swirl Brownies, Peanut Brown-Butter Cookies, Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies, Coconut Cake Snowballs, Mortadella Cookies, Popcorn Bucket Cookies. (I would start with these last ones).

Nobody Wants to Be a Foodie

Jaya Saxena - illustrations by Julia Dufossé / Eater

How “foodie” went from badge of honor to cringey term to pejorative smear and all the way back again.