The Kitchen and the Laboratory
The world is all about various perspectives, the more keenly you look at something the deeper you feel about it. However, that’s not the fascinating part, the intriguing part is that each time you observe something with a different paradigm, you may discover something neoteric that perhaps was neglected before! The beauty of this phenomenon lead to a serendipitous revelation about a very common place- “The Kitchen”!
If examined intensely, a normal apartment kitchen resembles a complex science laboratory! Sleek, sombre and monochrome, professionally designed with granite counters that are furnished definitely are similar to the appearance of a school laboratory! Nothing superfluous and minimalistic in nature, a school lab is just another place for home science; the kitchen paradoxically being a place for experiments in disguise! The floor tiles clad the pillars, giving it a soft and iridescent sheen, like the colourful chemicals sprawled across the shelves. Dirty enamel mugs and unrinsed dishes are like the test tubes beholding the extracts and samples of various experiments. Advanced tools are hung up on hooks like utensils in the kitchen, beside the cleansed sink and water tap. As dug deeper, more and more similarities unearth, making a bold statement for itself- “Even though the kitchen is extremely different from a school lab, if looked from an unusual vantage point, they very neatly resemble each other!”
The bubbling of chemicals in the nitid test tubes bring out the excitement of students to know the results of the experiment. In the kitchen, the stirring of contents and arising aroma of the food being prepared replicate the thrill of the chef to serve the delicacy and receive the comments of the customers. Countless number of reactions occur parallelly in both sites like: Boiling, sublimation, precipitation and condensation, causing gaudy pastels to appear in test tubes and cooking pans. Clattering of petri dishes or plates, produce a similar resonance, the one that keep reverberating in your ears till you get accustomed to it. Labs have people with white coats and kitchens have white aprons in bargain!
Fermentation of yeast makes bread at home and helps produce ethanol in a lab! Substances like ammonia, vinegar, baking soda, lime water, salts and oils are lined up in bottles like soldiers in attention in both the places. Sometimes used for explosive reactions, sometimes used to give a treat to taste buds, we can never get enough of these chemicals. Cutting, chopping and crushing samples to prepare extracts are same as preparing vegetables for sauté! Each detail when compared in the kitchen and lab, are extremely similar!
Lastly, in both these places we learn how to balance the equations of life! Everything should be in the right proportion, only then a successful outcome can be expected! Ingredients in appropriate amounts and chemicals in accurate mole numbers lead to preparation of precise outcomes. Labs and kitchens are not only places to balance equations of materials, they too help us equate relationships better! Bonds grow stronger, when people work as a team to develop a certain dish or conduct a certain experiment! Both of these places strike the emotional tangent and make us realise that the right things at the right place in the right amounts can produce something very beguiling!
No matter how exclusive in their own way, when looked from an atypical view, a kitchen can turn into a sensational science lab and vice versa!