As research continues, it seems inevitable that biotechnology will have an increasing impact on the food we eat. It offers huge potential for increasing the range and quality of food available to us, particularly more nutritious, palatable and stable food . It also seems likely that it will continue to bring advantages to the processing and safety monitoring of our food supply. There is an increasing desire among many consumers for food to be as 'natural' as possible, because such food is perceived by consumers to be more nutritious and safer to eat. However, food processing preserves food that would otherwise perish and gives us an interesting and varied choice of products.
Most food nowadays undergoes some form of processing.
There cannot be many people who haven't consumed bread , wine , yoghurt or cheese . Such 'traditional' biotechnology has played an important role in the development of our food supplies for thousands of years. Biotechnology was practised by our ancestors in an effort to find new ways of producing foods. Through trial and error, they learned how to breed and domesticate animals, and developed a variety of food crops. They also developed techniques, such as baking, brewing and fermentation, to process and preserve raw foods.