Pillar III · Nourishment
The Table, The Knowledge, The Joy
Food, health, and the skill to take care of yourself. Where Limbic Literacy protects against what harms you, Nourishment feeds what you need — the generative counterweight. Where House of Viridian is not a framework but a table. Pull up a chair.
- Knowledge
- The relationship between food and health, season and ingredient. Prevention over treatment.
- Skill
- Cooking without instruction cards. Making stock. Reading a market, in any city in the world.
- Joy
- The carbonara at Luciano’s. The long table. Joy is also prevention.
The Negroni limit
The number of cocktails seems infinite, but it is not. Taste imposes limits, and those limits can be calculated. A half-serious survey of a finite space.
The Elimination Diet as Identity Project
We've created a culture where diet is identity, which obscures the real issues.
What saffron is
Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, and the most adulterated. How to tell the real thing from the fake, and why that knowledge is worth having.
The Sixties, When Nobody Was Obese
What changed between then and now was not genetics, but what we eat and how we live.
The table as a starting point
Why Nourishment begins at the table: food, knowledge, and the skill to take care of yourself.
Nutrition Is Passion
Eating is not only physiology. It's how we tell each other that life is worth living.
Reading a market, in any city
Why reading a market is a basic skill we are losing: which season it is, which ingredient, which quality.
When Medicine Was Just Marketing
The history of pharmaceuticals teaches us to be cautious about what companies promise.
Joy is prevention too
Critique without joy turns sour; joy without critique turns naive. Nourishment needs both.
The Food Bank Is a Symptom, Not a Solution
Food banks hide the real problem: structural inability to feed yourself.
Health Is Not an Expense
Viewing your health as a cost is a fundamental accounting error. It is something that yields returns.
Supplements Are Not Food
Good nutrition comes first. Supplements fill gaps. They never replace the actual work.
Movement Is Not a Hobby
A routine built on compound movements and mobility solves more than any supplement ever will.
What You Don't Measure, You Can't Guide
Blood tests reveal what's actually happening in your body. Without that data, you're navigating in darkness.
Health as Priority
Health is not something you maintain casually. It is an active choice that must compete with everything else seeking your attention.
Prevention as a forgotten discipline
Why we spend billions on repair and virtually nothing on prevention.
Why good design is invisible
The best designs do not stand out. They work.
Never again, not me, not now
On the failure of collective memory and why 'never again' is a promise nobody keeps.
The return of the city-state
How cities are outpacing the nation-state and why that has consequences for how we organize our food.
The illusion of control in complex systems
Why more measurement does not lead to more grip but to more blindness.
How the Veneto builds for centuries, not for quarters
On a building tradition that treats sustainability not as a label but as a starting point.
The myth of technological neutrality
Technology is never neutral. The question is always: for whom was it designed?
Connection without Capture
Privacy as a design principle, not an afterthought.
Limbic literacy
Why digital resilience is not an individual responsibility.
Adaptive reuse
Why the best buildings already exist.
The Italian piazza as social design
Why the best public spaces are not designed for efficiency but for encounter.
The Discriminating Eye: on what is lost when a culture stops telling things apart
A pamphlet on recovering the older, finer sense of the word "discrimination" — to distinguish, to tell things apart. On heritage brands across their life cycle, the inversion of quiet luxury, the object as tool rather than self-expression, and what is lost when a culture can no longer choose what to value.
The Tigelliera on the Table
The Tigellino chain in Bologna serves tigelle pre-filled, from the kitchen. In Modena the press sits on the table and guests fill their own. The same bread, an inverted social logic — and a lesson in how to preserve tradition without lapsing into folklore.
Multipolar food security
What geopolitics has to do with your plate.
The empty runway
Why Europe can no longer tell its own story.
The Bauhaus legacy and the return to craft
How the most influential design school of the twentieth century forgot its own principles.
Design in Production
Why design does not stop at the drawing table and what that means for how we build organizations.
The art market and the disappearance of the eye
When price becomes the only measure, the ability to see vanishes.
Change is not the problem
The problem is that we treat change as a problem.
Navigating versus planning
Why organizations get stuck in their own methodology and what the alternative is.
Wabi-sabi and the imperfect
A Japanese aesthetic that the West urgently needs.
395,000 Unemployed — So What?
NU.nl reports 395,000 unemployed. But the real number tells a different story.
Metamorphoses at the Rijksmuseum
Why we need the old masters to understand our own transformations.
Saffron and the disappearance of ingredient literacy
Knowing what saffron is goes beyond following a recipe. It is a form of literacy that is vanishing.
Fermentation as cultural heritage
From kimchi to sauerkraut: how the world's oldest preservation method risks disappearing.
Reading the market
Why buying local is not a lifestyle choice but a trainable skill.
Broth as medicine
On the forgotten foundation of the kitchen and why your grandmother's recipe is medicinal heritage.
43,000 civil servants and nobody ordered them
The Dutch central government grew by 38 percent in six years. Nobody voted for it. Everyone benefited. And now everyone wants to cut back.
The illusion of control
Why local councils struggle with affiliated organisations — and why ownership is the only real answer.
Trend scan 2026: seven domains, one message
The Dutch Interior Ministry mapped the major trends facing the Netherlands. The connections between them tell a more important story than the trends themselves.
Wishful thinking about America
Europe is in acute danger, but we act as if it will be fine. On a historical pattern of denial.
Can Gucci Make Luxury Out of Artificial Intelligence?
On Demna's debut, the emptiness of our time, and the displaced who seek belonging in price tags.
Unheard of, but heard everywhere
About the angry citizen, political simplification and the loss of stratification in society.
Connection without Capture, also in the kitchen
Viridian's design principle, applied to food.
Prevention is cheaper than treatment
About my father, complementary medicine and the revenue model of the health industry.
The carbonara at Luciano in Rome
About the dish that changed my idea of cooking.
Recognizing seasonal vegetables at the market
Being able to read a market is a skill. In any city in the world.
The majority is always wrong
About groupthink, conformism and the courage to think differently.
The Johari window and other mirrors
About self-knowledge instruments, Big Five and the question of whether you can measure yourself.
37 cities, a suitcase and a city guide
The city as a teacher. About Monocle guides and traveling as a method.
Design as a way of thinking
Design is not aesthetics. It is a method of thinking about how the world works.
Drawing broth as a basic skill
The recipe that is not a recipe. Why stock is the foundation of cooking.
The paradox of the Dutch international position
Small country, big footprint. Almost twenty years later: is that paradox still there?
Slow Food and the Ark of Taste
About forgotten vegetables, endangered cheeses and why culinary heritage matters.
Food Rules — three lessons from Michael Pollan
Seven words that make an entire diet book redundant.
Five books that shaped my thinking
No ranking but five short stories about books and the moments when I read them.
The advisor no longer exists (and that's good)
How the profession of strategist has changed. From expert to co-creator.
What does a city say about its residents?
About visions of the future, Monocle guides and the question of whether you can design a city.
The return of the slow thought
Why start writing again. What has changed since 2011.
Why the government doesn't learn
If many policies don't work, why does the government remain so attached to them?
Wine, tasting and the art of mindful tasting
Finding words for what you taste. An exercise in language and attention.
The aglio e olio method
A simple dish as a metaphor for craftsmanship. Why the simplest things are the hardest.
Liberation Day and the luxury of discomfort
About freedom, polarization and the courage to differ in opinion.