The boy came back the next day. The old man was waiting for him.
"I've been thinking," said the boy.
"I'm sure you have!," said the old man, laughing.
"If the food stopped feeding us," said the boy, "what changed?"
The old man looked at his hands.
"Everything. Your body needs real food to run," he said. "It has a list of things it needs."
"A list?"
"Forty things," said the old man. "Give or take. Vitamins. Minerals. Things the earth made and your body learned to expect."
"And we stopped getting them?"
"Slowly," he said. "The way you don't notice the temperature dropping until you're already cold."
"What happens when you don't get them?" asked the boy.
The old man was quiet for a moment.
"You get tired," he said. "You gain weight. You get sick. You start wanting more food than you need because your body is still looking for what it didn't find."
"So we're not eating too much," said the boy slowly. "We're eating... wrong?"
"You're eating plenty," said the old man. "And starving anyway."
The boy sat with that.
"Does anyone know this?" he asked.
The old man smiled. That same smile as before.
"Some people know. The ones who broke the food know." he said.
"Then why—"
"Because hungry people buy more food," said the old man. "And sick people buy more medicine."
"That's—"
"Yes," said the old man. "It is."
The boy picked up a leaf from the table. Turned it over. Examined it closely.
"The body has a way of fixing itself," said the old man, without being asked. "If you give it what it needs."
"What does it need?"
"What it always needed," he said. "What the earth used to put in the food before we got clever."
"And if it gets those things?"
"It remembers how to work," said the old man. "How to grow. How to balance. How to stop asking for more than it needs."
"Like a hunger that turns off?" asked the boy.
"Like a hunger that gets answered," said the old man. "Finally."
"Is that what those shots do?" asked the boy. "The ones that make you not hungry?"
"No!", the old man said, surprised by his own reaction.
"The shots tell your body to stop wanting," said the old man. "But it's not real. Your body wants what's actually good for it."
"And people who take them sometimes get really sick because they're ignoring nature. People think the shots are magic, but they only work for a while."
"What I'm talking about gives your body a reason to stop."
"There's a difference?"
"All the difference," he said.
The boy looked at the bottle still sitting on the table.
"Is this what does it?" he asked.
"That's part of it," said the old man.
"What's in it?"
"What's been missing," he said.
The boy turned the bottle slowly in his hands.
"Has it helped people?" he asked.
"The people who have found it are very happy," said the old man. "Their bodies remembered."
"What happened to them?"
The old man looked out the window.
"They started to feel like themselves again," he said. "Lighter. Clearer. Young, like you. Like they finally found something they'd looking for for a long time."
The boy was quiet for a moment.
"I'd like to hear their stories," he said.
"Yes," said the old man. "I thought you might."
