Aanyone who is tempted by ordering from the kiddie menu, you might not have to be sneaky about it anymore. Mini meals could soon be the norm as the boom in weight-loss jabs takes a hefty bite out of the restaurant trade. Some two-thirds of users are eating out less, while smaller appetites mean smaller profits, and we can’t have that now can we? To soften the blow, culinary wizard Heston Blumenthal predicts the drugs will revolutionise the way we eat within just six months.
“The growth of Wegovy and Mounjaro – those injections reduce people’s appetite,” says the chef, whose constellation of Michelin stars proves he knows a thing or two about filling bellies. “So it’s going to have a massive effect on the quantity of food that people eat, massive effect on supermarkets, massive effect on just generally what people eat. More than ever before. This is going to be in the next six months.”
It’s already happening in New York where one burger joint now offers a “teeny-weeny mini burger”, a mini portion of fries, and a small beer for customers on GLP-1 medications, or for anyone who just can’t stomach a 3,000-calorie whopper.
It’s still a decent feed, really, the sort of meal that would have been normal 50 years ago. The gigantic portion sizes we’ve become used to are a new phenomenon. Think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they walked miles every day and would be lucky to get an old root to gnaw on. Or even during rationing, a slither of corned beef on a cracker was a treat.
Overeating has become so normalised that we’ve lost all sense of what a normal appetite looks like.
Imagine trying to explain to a Victorian the concept of a bucket of chicken: “So you start with about 10 birds but you only want the legs. There are no plates or knives or forks. You eat it straight from the bucket. Yes, like a farm animal. No, it’s not considered weird at all, honestly.”
Or an all-you-can-eat buffet: “You have about 30 different dishes that you cook but don’t eat straight away. Instead you leave it at a lukewarm temperature for about 10 hours until a crust has formed. Then it’s sort of a competition to get as much of it on a plate as possible.”
Or a triple-decker burger: “It’s a bread, meat, bread, meat, bread, meat, bread stack glued together with cheese about the size and weight of a toddler’s head. You can’t actually eat it, unless you unhinge your jaw like a snake, so you repeatedly mash it into your face to break it down.” They’d rightly think we’d lost the plot.