I put up my hand at every opportunity, but to no avail. In the question and answer part of the Science Cafe, I didn't get to ask my question on whether instead of engineering our [food]{style="font-style: italic;"} to avoid obesity, we could tackle it from the other direction and genetically re-engineer [ourselves]{style="font-style: italic;"}.

We were shown a series of maps of America; one for each year from the early 90s to today, showing the level of obesity. It showed a dramatic increase. Much of the talk focussed on how to engineer food to taste fatty but not cause weight gain. Apparently we sense fat by its consistency rather than its taste.

The speaker did point out a problem with such food, in that anorexics might eat nothing but that type of food, when in fact they need [more]{style="font-style: italic;"} fat in their diet.