If a pill makes hundreds of millions of people stop wanting more, do we end up in a world where obesity is a 20th-century problem?
Farms grow more than people need. Retailers stock more than they'll sell. Restaurants plate more than anyone can finish. About 30-40% of food gets thrown away (USDA). The waste is the margin the whole industry runs on.
In the last six weeks, the FDA approved an oral version of appetite suppressant, the Indian patent expired, and prices crashed to around 8 dollars per month. China folded obesity treatment into its national health plan, with screening aimed at over a billion people by 2030.
So if hundreds of millions of people end up on something that meaningfully suppresses appetite, are we looking at a different future entirely?
Do we look back at the era of supersize me, vending machines in schools, and 64oz sodas the way we now look back at smoking sections on planes, a strange thing humans used to do before we had tools to stop?
Or does the food economy not actually shrink, just reroute, engineered to slip past whatever's getting suppressed, the way social media routed around our attention after TV stopped working?