Road Trip Snacks and Tomato Sorbet 🍅
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to manufacture scarcity (and savory ice-creams or perfumes) as desire engine. Because eating is also a ridiculous activity
Hi there!
I'm probably on a train right now and I will be on a long journey next week (newsletter will be back on August 19th).
In the meantime remember: your friends don’t want fridge magnets from your travels, they want snacks.
Stay safe, don't buy magnets with their obscure magical force.
Piero
✹ Margaret Atwood, Edible Woman. You should check it out it if you're into food and feminism, the sexual politics of meat, and the poetics of food. An intriguing trigger for reading more about that could be this post by Ren @adelicatereader.
Ferment this, ferment that
When someone finally writes the history of my family, it will be noted that I never managed to make anyone happy by serving homemade pickles as a side dish. My tsukemono-banchan experiment was a failure. All those jars and all those fragrant vinegars were bought in vain. Fermented French fries almost did the trick. Well, you know what? Read this: “While fermenting vegetables and fruit was once a task of domestic drudgery, Aya Hirata Kimura shows how the art of tsukemono can now be appreciated as a catalyst for sociocultural change amid a growing awareness of the drawbacks of antibiotic modernity.” Let’s ferment again.
Fermenting for the Future. Japanese Pickles and Microbial Foodway by Aya Hirata Kimura
→ Shortplot: 🧂 🥒 🍶 🥬
Fine dining, expensive watches, overtourism: the performance of wanting things
A trapper my kids play on repeat brags about a Rolex Daytona with the wrong time, but he never checks it anyway. The watch isn't for telling time. It's a receipt.
That's the same logic some luxury brands built an empire on: manufactured scarcity as desire engine. This smart video by Britt Pearce argues something has cracked: scarcity used to read as exclusivity. Now it reads as a locked door with a price tag you're not allowed to pay.
Fine dining has its own version of the Daytona trick. A tasting menu you booked eleven months ago, that costs a month's rent, that photographs beautifully and leaves you hungry an hour later. The scarcity is real this time (there are only so many covers a kitchen can turn), but the marketing borrows the same trick: you're not paying for the food, you're paying for having gotten in.
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And then there's the opposite failure mode. TikTok didn't create scarcity, it destroyed it. It took a hidden trattoria, a quiet beach, a family-run bakery, and turned them into checkpoints. Not "I discovered this," but "I did what everyone else did, in the exact order they did it."
Overtourism isn't about too many people wanting something rare. It's about a rare thing becoming a script everyone performs to prove they're keeping up.
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The Rolex problem and the overtourism problem look opposite (locked out vs. everyone let in) but they're the same disease: the object stops mattering, the performance takes over.
So where's the third path? Maybe it's not scarcity or virality, but proximity. The wine bar that doesn't take reservations, doesn't need to, because the people who show up already know what they're looking for. The chef who explains why the fish came from that boat instead of just plating it. Availability that rewards attention instead of algorithms.
What would a luxury look like if the point was to be understood, not envied?
🥕Gluten Free - 2 Ingredients - Carrot Buttons, you'll need glutinous rice flour (★recipe) 🍞It's only one slice of bread, but apparently you need five rules for the best summer toast (★recipe) 🟨A single image post with butter yellow text is the Internet’s new favorite format 🥨18 Of The Best Road Trip Snacks (★recipes) and 30 Make Ahead Recipes Perfect for Road Trips! (★recipes) 🍌Banana Bread Carajillo, a dessert you can drink (★recipe)
The Only Thing Better Than a Summer Tomato Is Smelling Like One
Elizabeth Gulino / Allure
Ok, “vegetable scents” are rising in popularity, with brands leaning into hyper-realistic garden/cooking inspirations (especially tomato) as gourmand tastes evolve toward fresher, more complex notes. Life is better Rhubarb Thief (Heretic) and Jo Malone’s veggie trio (Scarlet Beetroot, Velvety Butternut, Carrot Blossom).
