The Killer Salad and the Peppery Taste of the Stars 😝

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start filling an anxiety bag with flaming sardines, cornbread focaccia, and edible celestial bodies

Hi there!

We must be quick. I have to write about the "panic pouches", or "anxiety bags", that are supposed to be the Gen Z's new must-carry. A compact emotional first-aid kit stocked with sour candy, fidget toys, earplugs, whatever helps them self-soothe on the spot.

Anxiety just got its own accessory line, checklist included.

Now it has triggered me: why don't I have one? Will one mini Nutella spread single portion be enough for my anxiety? Or should I upgrade my bag to bring larger portions around?

With anxiety, you never know...

Piero

✹Rebecca Elson, Antidotes to Fear of Death. It goes like that: "..Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark til they are all, all inside me, pepper hot and sharp...". Where did I get that? From this book by Sarah Wilson.

The City of the World's Desire

I know you all are obsessed with the Odyssey, right now. Well, take Troy, walk 300 km north-east (and a few centuries) and you get to Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul is the place I'd love to spend days eating and learning recipes. Good for me, here we have 80 recipes tracing the city's multicultural table: workmen's canteens, Bosphorus seafood shacks, farmers' market finds carried over by White Russian and Sephardic communities. Chargrilled meat next to a majority of vegetarian dishes, plus her mother's yoghurt and courgette pasta bake. History in every recipe, ancient or personal.

Istanbul by Özlem Warren
→ Shortplot: 🥛 ☕️ 🥙 🥒

The Great Lettuce Scare

Cyclosporiasis cases in the US just passed 4,100. Salad chains are bleeding foot traffic, Taco Bell is offering a dollar off if you skip the lettuce, and food influencers are posting beet-and-lentil bowls instead of kale.

Cyclosporiasis is a gut infection caused by a parasite, usually spread through contaminated produce or water.

What's actually breaking here isn't the supply chain. It's trust. People don't know which lettuce is safe, so they treat all lettuce as guilty.

Which raises the real question for the industry: when a single ingredient gets contaminated by scandal rather than science, how long before the whole category becomes suspect by association?

Beef had this moment. Eggs had this moment. Now lettuce it is.

🥚Quick Egg Bites (★recipe) 🍨How to make the perfect homemade Viennetta, if you have to (★recipe) 🌽Fresh Corn Cornbread Focaccia with Blackberries (★recipe) 🧢The Invite sounds like a fun film, and it comes with a Jamón hat 🧊Ice Cube Tray Pizza (★recipe) 😵‍💫Optical Biscuits (★recipe) ⚽️Dont't miss: Football World Champion Lamine-Yamal and his grandma's dried fruit plate ☕️Salty Canadian Coffee (★recipe) 🔬The rise of mini Martinis, Snaquiris and other diminutive drinks 🍅The Juice That Reduced Inflammation Markers in Just 4 Weeks 🍽️In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical 🎃Pumpkin breadsticks (★recipe) ⚗️Why baking soda makes a better ground beef 🍉What? Watermelon filled with fruit jello (★recipe)

Why does everything feel so joyless?

Michèle Mendelssohn + Charlie Tyson / The Guardian

Decadence today comes stripped of desire, wrapped in self-optimization instead. Pleasure gets outsourced to metrics. If decadence no longer needs pleasure, does food still need taste? Or just performance?

The ordinary sublime of the American diner

Henry Oliver / The Common Reader

The diner as a place where nothing spectacular happens, and that's exactly the point. What's the last place you ate that asked nothing of you? I hope you have one of those.