(INCR)EDIBLE N TASTY!

Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Dean of IIPM)

It would be no wonder to find a restaurant menu somewhere in the future littered with cloned, engineered, enhanced, advanced, morphed and modified food with ambrosial nutritional values, customised to even the minutest cell and onymous that puts to test man’s elementary scientific know-how every single time he decides to feed himself. Also surprisingly, it would be equally mundane to find news of people dying out of hunger. This unbridled dichotomy would continue to be associated with technology’s role in food for many years to come. While the world is breaking through at a breakneck speed, it has failed outright in breaking the shackles of food insecurity; and the ultimate challenge staring at the face of technology seems to be ensuring that hunger is bombed out of the Horn of Africa and other developing economies.

So how far has the world travelled till now? In 2006, land usage for growing biotech crops increased by a stupendous 13% to a staggering 252 million acres over the preceding year. A humongous 10.3 million farmers are into biotech farming. The recent usage (commercialised) of biotechnology goes to the extent of ensuring resistance in plants to some debilitating doses of insecticides and also making them insect and virus tolerant.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007