While eating breakfast tacos at our heavenly neighborhood taqueria, Gueros, this weekend, I began to muse on fat. After all, I could think of many reasons why the tacos were delicious (The tang of those pickled onion! The salt of that queso fresco! The bite of that habanera sauce!), but the plain tortilla chips were just as irresistible, and I had a feeling that it was because of the sheen of glistening oil that they wore after their bath in the deep fryer.

I formed an extemporaneous theory that this must be because of some evolutionary phenomenon. After all, it’s not that fat is bad, necessarily, just that it packs a huge wallop of calories and energy all at once, which was probably quite helpful if you were trying to, say, survive a famine. Jason was skeptical of this thinking—if fat was actually good, then why did his stomach feel so lousy after eating all that grease? If he had stalked a wooly tortilla chip across the icy tundra for four days, I retorted, his stomach would probably feel just fine.

While little information is available about the elusive wild tortilla chip, I did find some interesting evidence that scientific thought about fat is still evolving. For years, scientists believed that humans could not actually taste fat, but a discovery earlier this year points toward us having a specific gene that might make fattiness our “sixth taste” right after salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami. As an article in Psychology Today hints, this might be very bad news for the food companies who have poured lots of money into developing fat substitutes; our tongues can tell the difference.

Of course, scientists are already salivating at the idea of messing with this gene in order to treat obesity. And, okay, I realize that it might be a dangerous to let my genes convince me that I need the same amount of fat as an ancient hunter-gatherer. But I’d gladly run around Prospect Heights hefting a hunting spear if it means I can go back to Gueros. Why deny the deep genetic bond I share with those tortilla chips?