Welcome to Secret Breakfast / An exclusive newsletter, the best place to start your day with cider donuts, while drinking Mamajuana and enjoying some table-side exhibitionism

Hi there!

Why do we keep eating when we’re full? Or why do we keep shopping when we own too much?

The answer is the feeling of scarcity. As Michael Easter, author of Scarcity Brain, writes: “A scarcity cue is a piece of information that fires on our scarcity mindset. It leads us to believe we don’t have enough”.

Things like slot machines, dating apps, TikTok feeds, chasing “likes” on social media… They all have the three parts of a “scarcity loop”: opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

The problem - that is affecting our sense of happiness - is that we now have an abundance of the things we evolved to crave, yet we’re still programmed to think and act as if we didn’t have enough.

Piero

PS: quick edition today.

Photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran

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THE BEST QUOTE

✦ Michael Easter, Scarcity Brain. To escape the scarcity loop in food, the author visited the Tsimane, a healthy group of hunter and gatherers, living in Bolivia, who eat the same nutrient-dense food most meals every day and who have incredibly healthy hearts.

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THE BOOK

Yes, I’ll Have Some Hype, Please

★★★★☆

If you dug Epicurious, Bon Appétit or that thing called The Interweb (nobody calls it like that), you may have already met Molly Baz. According to Eater “her followers want to make all of her recipes as soon as they’re posted online” and the book “More Is More is a response to the kind of cooking she did as a line cook in restaurants: aggressively restrained and composed plates that are both easy to make at home and look beautiful in photos”. Is this a good cookbook or is it a well-executed PR hype? I believe it is both. And I believe we always need some energy while cooking. Throughout the book, you'll encounter Crispy Rice Egg-in-a-Hole, a Chicken Salad with Coconut Crunch a Drunken Cacio e Pepe, The Only Meatloaf that Matters (★recipe) and a few QR codes to step-by-step audio tutorials for a hands-free cook-along. Bonus: you can try 39 of Molly’s recipes and make up your mind.

More is More by Molly Baz
→ Shortplot: 🥗 🍳 🍗 🍝

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RANDOM ACTS OF HUNGER

This is the space where I share some food (un)related stuff of my week

🛒It Looks That Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment 🎃Something For Halloween: Pumpkin Pie Coffee (★recipe) 🥞Sourdough Pumpkin Pancakes (★recipe)🥞Sourdough Pumpkin Pancakes (★recipe)💡Dwight Garner Always Has a Muffuletta in the Freezer 🍞…and this is how to bake some of that Palermitan bread (★recipe)🍸These are the 50 best bars in the world for 2023 🍁Maple Pecan Bundt (★Cake) 🍲Something Warm: Caldo Verde (★recipe) 🍩A Cider Donut (★recipe) Map of New England🦁(This One is a Déja-vu) Lion burgers, tiger steaks, and mammoth meatballs 😭This Is For The Guys Here: When Someone You Love Is Upset, Ask This One Question 🎶Try This Cooking Playlist by Francesca at Sfoglia and become the “queen of the f***ing hob”

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FOOD FOR LATER

Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur 
Adam Reiner / Eater

“A former fine dining server dishes on how the flambé, a dying convention of French haute cuisine, became the ultimate tableside flex”

In the Dominican Republic, Mamajuana Is a Drink, a Medicine, and a Rite of Passage 
Mike Diago / Punch

“Each year, 4 million airline passengers arrive in the United States from the Dominican Republic—roughly 10,000 per day. As customs agents rifle through luggage, they routinely encounter large glass bottles packed with botanicals like tree bark, wood chips, twigs, roots, and whole spices—the makings of the Dominican Republic’s national drink, mamajuana”.

➤ Last week's most clicked link was 71 Cheap Dinner Ideas That Do the Most With the Least - but… I also screwed up Taylor Swift’s cookies link: here you go, please forgive me. And that's all for today.