Many of my colleagues in the "whole foods" movement don't share my view, but all tinkering with food isn't a bad thing. By adding iodine to salt, we've probably eliminated mental retardation caused by iodine deficiency. We already have flaxseed oil, designed to have higher levels of cancer-fighting lignans, and I can certainly envision, for example, a tomato with higher levels of vitamin A.

So should food technology be used to engineer lower-calorie food?

Maybe. But it's a slippery slope. Artificial sweeteners certainly lower the calories of some foods, but there's considerable controversy over whether they're good for you (some, like erythritol, are fine; others, like aspartame, not so much). And we all know that the low-fat movement produced more than its fair share of junk foods.

In the best of all possible worlds, we'd cut calories the old fashioned way -- by pushing away from the table when we're three-fourths full. When we start engineering foods with chemicals instead of real ingredients, we may indeed be able to cut their calorie content, but at what cost? Our bodies know what to do with real food. They don't always know what to do with chemicals.

So sure, fortify away -- add some iodine to the salt, breed some extra antioxidants into our crops, tinker with the protein content of corn and even add some omega-3's to the feed of chickens. But in my view, cutting calories -- one of the healthiest things we can do for ourselves -- is better done by smaller portions, not by creating Frankenfoods.
Just because the technology exists to remove fat, calories or carbs with clever engineering doesn't mean we have to use it. I'd still rather see us eat less of the "real thing" than more "food products" filled with chemicals and substitutes.