Substack can now scan newsletters for AI-generated content.
Plus: fall internships for college students, a $250k party planning job at a16z, and more.
Today’s newsletter is free, because it’s presented by Instacart.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I am closely monitoring the Blowin’ In the Wind jokes on X ahead of the Bob Dylan concert at Forest Hills tonight. If I weren’t going to Queens tonight, I would try to make this Rachel Alice Roddy spaghetti recipe and finish London Falling.
Today’s newsletter includes: Fall internships that you should send to an ambitious college student in your life, Meta has a whole page dedicated to chefs who use Meta Glasses, restaurants creating secret menus for burgers, Substack is pitching itself as a place to “make a living,” and a $250k party planning job at a16z.
Catching up with Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray on summer hunger, Thai Diner, and partnering with Instacart.
Every summer, over 20 million kids across the country lose access to the free school meals they depend on. In New York neighborhoods like the South Bronx (one of the most food-insecure neighborhoods in New York City), that loss is a problem for an entire community.
Instacart is teaming up with Ghetto Gastro, the Bronx-born culinary collective co-founded by Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, as part of their largest-ever Summer Hunger campaign, in partnership with Feeding America. The collaboration centers on three things: developing accessible, nutritious recipes; showing up in communities through a live cooking event (like the City Harvest Mobile Market event on July 11); and rallying people to donate through Community Carts at instacart.com/donate.
Last week, I caught up with Jon Gray (who I first met almost ten years ago when I worked at Great Jones) to learn about how he decided to work with Instacart, the easiest way for New Yorkers to give back, and where he’s been eating in the city (he sends an Uber to bring Thai Diner all the way to the Bronx).
EMILY: You grew up in the Bronx and live close to where this City Harvest event is happening. What does summer hunger actually look like on the ground there?
JON: The thing with hunger, it’s almost like Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. You can’t necessarily see that a person is hungry or know what they’re going through from the eye test. When I was growing up in this neighborhood and also when I lived in Spanish Harlem when I was six years old, I remember a lot of my friends in New York City public schools—so many people, that’s where they ate.
That school lunch, no matter how terrible it might’ve looked, we had friends that partook in that because that’s where they ate. Another meal wasn’t always going to happen at home. They might not have had breakfast.
I remember when I was living in public housing, when my mom was getting on her feet, they used to have the summer breakfast program at a school on 3rd Avenue between 96th and 95th Street, and I used to go get the carrot cakes and the banana breads. I was always a picky eater, but that was my go-to. I didn’t mess with the milk, but I’d definitely get the banana bread.
A lot of people don’t know that the Bronx is home to the largest food distribution network in the United States, second largest in the world. When you think about fish markets, the only fish market that’s larger than the one here in Hunts Point is the one in Toyosu in Japan. But we deal with a lot of the adverse effects of having this food distribution from the fossil fuel emissions from the diesel trucks, so you have high asthma rates, but then you have lack of nutritious and delicious food access, even though all of this food is leaving the neighborhood. So you have high diabetes, hypertension, all of these things because it’s not easy to get nutritious and delicious food. This is one of the most food insecure parts of New York City, which is crazy when you think about the wealth and it’s like a tale of two cities for real.
“A lot of people don’t know that the Bronx is home to the largest food distribution network in the United States, second largest in the world. When you think about fish markets, the only fish market that’s larger than the one here in Hunts Point is the one in Toyosu in Japan.”
EMILY: Brands must constantly come to Ghetto Gastro wanting to work with you. What part of Instacart’s pitch made you actually want to work with them?
JON: It was a few things. The fact that we actually use Instacart—when we’re in the lab and we need something on the fly, when we’re working on recipes or filming something, it’s like, All right, we’re going to hit Instacart to get what we need. That’s usually the first step: Do we use this? Because we always want to be authentic in our storytelling and our partnerships.
The second part was the impact bit. It’s like, Oh wait, this is not just about capitalism. This is making an impact in the area that’s near and dear to our heart, which is trying to work on food insecurity and work on the hunger crisis, because it’s a real thing and right now it’s not getting better with the different cuts in SNAP. It’s a lot of cuts in this type of funding. So being able to have that double bottom line where these are for‑profit entities but doing business in a radical way that impacts humans in a good way—I think that has to be the future of how business works. It can’t just be “give me, give me, give me, give me.”
And then also the team. My whole thing is I like working with people that I wouldn’t mind having dinner with or a drink with outside of whatever the project is.
EMILY: For New Yorkers who have the ability to give, what are some easy and effective ways they can help their neighbors beyond this Instacart program?
JON: I think it’s always best to get involved in things that you’re truly interested in. Food for me is my life, so I can’t take my privilege for granted, especially knowing intimately folks that are hungry and folks that are still using SNAP benefits and food stamps that are close friends and family. That’s why this is near and dear to me. With Instacart’s Community Carts, it’s just so easy. A big barrier is that everybody has good intentions, but actually executing on the intention has too many barriers to entry—people don’t know how to do it.
So being able to spread the word about Instacart and Community Carts is important. Each one teach one. We often look outside of ourselves to make a big gesture, but it could be a small gesture. It could be peanut butter, rice, and a certain ingredient that a food pantry in your neighborhood needs. You can spend 15, 20 bucks and that gets sent right there through Community Carts.
I also work with Rethink Food—I’m on the board. They’re doing community meals where they’re giving grants to small restaurants in local neighborhoods that then feed folks. And Sky High Farm upstate of Hudson—I’m on the board of that organization too. They’re growing food and giving it to local food banks, but beautiful food, beautiful produce, beautiful protein. So I think people should do what feels good and what they care about or have some type of knowledge or interest in.
EMILY: You created three recipes for this Instacart program. Can you walk us through them, starting with your “fire ants on a log”?
JON: My recipe is Fire Ants on a Log. I made this in my food stamp era, when I was living in Spanish Harlem. I was going through it, but I had a tale of two cities life, too, because my mother, even though she was on the come up and figuring it out, was like, “I’m putting you in afterschool and summer camp at 92nd Street Y.” As part of the afterschool program, we published a book. My mother sent me a picture of the cookbook I made when I was a kid.
My recipe was ants on a log, but this is the OG style: celery, peanut butter, raisins. It’s a way to get kids to eat veggies and get some fiber and some roughage, but still have a sweetness and a protein. It’s a really well‑balanced snack.
I took some of my new knowledge and new flavors. Cherry pistachio was always my favorite ice cream growing up. We’d go to the Japanese hibachi spot close to my neighborhood in the Bronx called Edo, in Westchester and Pelham Manor, and I’d get the cherry pistachio ice cream. I was like, All right, let’s do a cherry pistachio ants on a log. So we do the pistachio cream, pistachio butter kind of vibe with dried cranberries that were soaked in cherry juice.
I’m the non‑chef in the gang, so it was about kids and summer hunger. I wanted to make something where you don’t have to have a kitchen—thinking about folks that might be in shelters or on the move. You can do something nutritious, delicious, and introduce people to new ingredients.
I know tasting some “crazy” things when I was five or six years old really opened my aperture. I view the plate as a portal. Even if you don’t have a passport and you can’t travel, you can travel on your plate and learn things about different cultures and ways of being.
EMILY: What are your top three favorite restaurants in New York right now—your summer spots?
JON: Do you remember the show Making the Band? Do you remember Dylan, Dylan, Dylan? I’m going to just say Gourmega, Gourmega, Gourmega. In all seriousness, we just opened Gourmega, so that’s my favorite spot—I’ve got to plug that.
I love what Paul Carmichael is doing at Kabawa, just really taking those crazy Caribbean flavors and reinventing…not even reinventing, but doing some crazy things like dry‑aging fish in a beautiful way and doing these beautiful patties in the bar that they have.
I love La Morada—I’ll always pick that spot in the Bronx. It’s Oaxacan cuisine on Willis. We partnered with them years ago during the pandemic to feed over 100,000 families at the height of the pandemic. And I’m such a creature of habit—I have to just say Thai Diner. I probably eat there once or twice a week. I’ll send an Uber to pick up my order and bring it to the Bronx just to bust down that short rib while I watch House of the Dragon. It’s a true luxury—my luxuries are eating good and getting really good food.
➡️ Donate through Community Carts: Go to instacart.com/donate and send exactly what a local food bank needs, delivered straight to them with no fees.
FALL INTERNSHIPS
Students get free Feed Me subscriptions with a .edu email address by filling out this form.
🛍️ Personal Shopping and Stylist Intern at Khaite. You’ll support the creation of personalized client edits by researching client preferences and purchase history, as well as admin support to the Private Client Manager. (New York)
🍷 Harvest Intern at Far Niente Winery. You’ll assist with the production of high-quality wines from Napa Valley. This position will start in August and will run through mid-November. (Napa)
🗣️ Fall Intern at New York Post. The Post offers a range of internships across sports reporting, social media, and technology. (New York)
💻 Software Engineer Intern at Notion. You’ll design and enhance the Notion product with new capabilities with an AI first mindset. (SF)
🇺🇸 Fall Business Intern at Punchbowl News. You’ll support the business team by assisting with advertising, subscriptions, partnerships, marketing, community engagement, and events to drive revenue growth. (D.C.)
🏗️ Kering Corporate Real Estate Intern. You’ll support the group with retail and corporate real estate development planning and its execution across the regions. (Paris)
There is a growing community of millennials who are buying their second home first, while continuing to rent their primary residence. And many of them seem to have the same hat. One has a newsletter to help others who are interested in doing the same. It is called, yes, Second Home First.
Meta Glasses posted a collaboration with French pastry chef Cedric Grolet. Last year, the New York Times called Grolet “the internet’s most famous pastry chef.” Last time I passed his chocolate shop in Paris, there were velvet ropes organizing dozens of hungry customers. One of the patterns I’ve noticed with Meta Glasses is that they like to partner with chefs — Laila Gohar made the desserts for their most recent New York launch party, but they’ve been working with chefs for years. Even chefs like Four Horsemen’s Nick Curtola have been making content with Meta Glasses, unofficially. After doing some digging around, I learned Meta has a whole page dedicated to cooking with Meta Glasses. The use case the tech company makes for chefs is that you can order groceries and ask recipe questions while wearing the glasses. But I think the likelier reason the Meta glasses have proven popular with chefs and food/cooking content is just that people like to watch POV cooking videos, and surveilling vegetables is less concerning than surveilling people.
Substack launched a new feature with Pangram that scans newsletters for AI-generated content.
The NYT launched a local newsletter covering only the Twin Cities. This is like a Times-scale version of neighborhood Substacks proliferating. Feels extremely interesting, both as a content experiment and strategically. The Times has done this before with daily letters like “California Today,” but that transitioned from a full-blown newsletter to a links/stories roundup in 2024 after undoubtedly proving challenging for one writer to cover the entire state in that manner. Picking one city (or a pair of cities, in this case)— comprising the country’s 16th largest metro area—feels like the perfect size to try this again. The Local: Twin Cities will launch in August.
Nili Lotan is launching footwear. The designer is also opening two stores in South Korea this year, and one “concept store” in New York.
a16z New Media is hiring an events planner for $250k. “The Events Partner for New Media is a senior operator responsible for designing and executing a portfolio of high-impact experiences - from intimate community dinners to multi-day summits and leadership retreats.”
Rubirosa’s, a Parisian boutique that I’ve never been to but could navigate with my eyes closed because of how many times I’ve seen it on my Instagram feed, is expanding. Lynette Nylander got an early look at the new location (right next door to the original), which will focus on more luxurious items like cashmere sweaters and shirting.
This $10 million apartment basically has its own members club inside. The Gramercy Park penthouse apartment features a custom turquoise Miele fridge, four fireplaces, a key to Gramercy Park, and a private saloon-like bar. If I was to buy that apartment, I’d turn the bar into the Feed Me Club, and we could all be members and hold shareholder meetings there. Cara Delevingne bought the apartment from Jimmy Fallon for $10.8 million in 2022. It’s now listed at $8.5 million.
London restaurants are experimenting with limited burger menus. The Infatuation reported that restaurants like Dove (which has 10 burgers available per service) and Vesper (which serves an off-menu gorgonzola burger) are part of this trend of secret menus. I think it’s fun.
Substack’s latest campaign highlights the writers who “make a living” on the platform. I’m not asking for an IRS audit of these writers’ finances, but it would be nice to know if “living” is defined by paid subscriptions, advertisements, events, outside gigs, or a combination of all of those. This framing by Substack was surprising to me, because in reality I’d guess maybe ~1000 publishers actually make a living salary from Substack subscribers. Unlike OnlyFans – where the explicit point of creating on the platform is to exchange content for money – Substack has long positioned itself as a place to connect people in interesting ways, foster creativity, and…write.
Substack has long gamified financial success on the platform through leaderboards and infantilizing colored checkmarks. The problem I see with selling Substack as a place where anyone can make a living, is that I’m just not sure there’s enough “market depth” of paid subscribers. Whereas there seems to be enough (almost endless) market depth for paid subs on OnlyFans, or for ad-monetized users on other platforms (YouTube). Substack’s product offering is this more earthbound combo of niche writing (limited market depth) + subscription-only monetization (cuts off the low end of the market that would would read with ads). This is perfectly fine for readers and writers who accept the limitations, but it might not be enough to drive the GMV of the platform to $100 billion.
All of this also explains Substack’s strategy to win “whale” writers and established celebrities who can attract larger groups of paid subs. While Feed Me has benefitted from Substack highlighting my work, I also recognize the first-mover advantage I had by being an early user. It’s far too simple to tell writers that if they join today, they can make a living here. Although I want people to get paid for their writing, I find the bar is really high for me to pay for new subscriptions.
I am curious what you all think: Do you see Substack as a place to build a business? A place to write and share your thoughts with friends? A social media platform? A side hustle? Or simply the technology that delivers your favorite newsletters to your inbox?
My guess is that Substack is following a similar trajectory to other creator led platforms and the top 1 per cent of Substackers are making 90 per cent of the money. It’s an obvious strategy to highlight the success stories but like other platforms Substack won’t hit the kind of growth that pleases VC types until it can reliably create a middle class.
I probably don’t make as much money as I could if I promised people that they could make a bunch of money on Substack. I would never do that.
Substack can be immensely profitable but not necessarily financially. I'm talking personally, professionally, creatively. The connections that can be made: my clients have gotten book deals and written for major media outlets and built businesses and created what used to be considered an enormous email list, especially for a writer just starting out. (There was a time when having a hundred people on your email list made you the boss.)
Making any money as a writer is a rare thing and always has been. (When I came of age as a writer, I was paid $250 for a book review for the New York Times. It was impossible to make a living.)
And we forget that email addresses alone are so valuable that Meta won't give them to us. There's much to be made here and it isn't just cash.