The other day, I was standing in my kitchen, eating some kettle-cooked BBQ chips, when I noticed a container of onion powder. I thought…are there other ingredients in onion powder? So, I flipped it over to check the ingredients.
One word: onion.
I don’t know why that surprised me. I guess I’ve gotten used to ingredient lists with a dozen things—mostly that I can’t pronounce. But this? Just onion. Nothing extra.
And it made me think: why does onion powder last for years while a fresh onion goes bad in weeks? The answer is simple: it’s been stripped down to the essentials. No moisture. No excess. Just what matters.
Subtraction Creates Longevity
The more I thought about it, the more I saw the pattern in our digital notes.
We tend to assume that adding things makes them better. More features, more structure, more complexity. But often, it’s the opposite.
