Primary driving force for most inventions is a need. The time-honoured expression Necessity is the mother of invention, in the nature of a proverb, seems to hog attention more to the factor of need than the sweat and toil that marks the birth of any invention. The question of birth of a need in real life and addressing the only option to fulfil that need by inventing, rather than by hook or crook is what technology is all about. The need for water and air to adequately address issues of survival in general and their qualitative and quantitative availability in particular in the face of scarcity bugging the land and its people seems to have clouded human activities focussed on a plethora of other needs, one of which, the most important one, namely food, also conforming to accepted norms and acceptable preferences of consumers. The debate on these issues brings one to the point of taking a kaleidoscopic view of food, particularly its ubiquitous presence from dawn to dusk, particularly in the life of urbanites, who consume the manna as it were without a care on producing it, thanks to the seamless benefits of inventions, read technology.
Every consumer needs to be made aware of the ingenuity of inventors in designing gadgets for home use as well as large scale operations and researchers sparing no efforts to get maximum mileage from raw materials raised on the fields by the farming fraternity. There is more to the issues bearing on food, but for the scope of this column, the scenario of restaurant industry should interest every urbanite.
