Abstract
We are almost halfway through the 40th volume year of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin (FNB), and our editorial offices have embraced the new blue-hued cover and 40th anniversary banner. In a continued allusion to the significance of 40 years, again from my Guatemalan environment, we note the romantic ballad, Mujer de las cuatro decadas [Lady of four decades], in which the nation’s most noted composer and performing artist, Ricardo Arjona, exhorts: pongale vida a los años [put life into your years]. Independently of whether or not one can impute gender to a journal, his extolling the balance of gained experience and persistent vitality is a suitable metaphor for the FNB.
In this second issue, we bring a collection of 9 original articles with themes ranging from dietary supplementation and complementary feeding and breastfeeding support to dietary practices in different social sectors to the potential of egg consumption during lactation; they emanate from Latin America, Africa, and Asia across the developing world. We also publish here the awards lecture for the V Rainer Gross Prize, delivered by remote video by Dr Sun Eun Lee of Johns Hopkins University, entitled: “The childhood plasma proteome discovers its applications in public health nutrition.” 1
As noted earlier, the history of this journal includes 3 Editors-in-Chief (EIC). Succeeding, in 2004, the founding EIC, Nevin Scrimshaw, was the 12-year editorship of Prof. Irwin Rosenberg. His interest in nutrition was born out of an experience in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with the Interdepartmental Commission on Nutrition in the National Defense and its survey in the 1960s. He has collaborated internationally in research in Iran and Guatemala. He headed the Subcommittee on the Interaction of Nutrition and Infection within the US National Academy of Sciences in the 1970s, with a focus on what we today know as environmental enteric dysfunction. Although his primary interest was in folate and vitamin B12, there is scarcely a vitamin or essential mineral that has not been the focus of a publication of Irv Rosenberg.
To the FNB, he brought his editorial experience as EIC at Nutrition Reviews and his experience from the “ships” he has sailed over the course of his professional career: chairmanship of the Food and Nutrition Board; directorship of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging; deanship of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy; and chairmanship of the Nevin Scrimshaw International Nutrition Foundation. The strongest forms of institutional leadership. Irv represents the other of the nutritional giants upon whose shoulders stands the third and current Editor. 2
In this June issue of the journal, Irv relates a narrative of his years at the helm of the FNB in the Commentary: “The Food and Nutrition Bulletin Grows with the International Nutrition Foundation into the 21st Century.” 3 The tone, texture, and substance of the publications, both original and review, evolved in the years of the Rosenberg editorship, and the online material for this issue includes illustrative single papers and full supplements that highlight the best quality and impact from the FNB literature of the era.
This is an opportunity to recognize that the health and function of this journal is not the product of an EIC alone; the FNB rides on the energy and drive of its Managing Editor, Corey O’Hara, our corps of Associate Editors, and our 25 Editorial Board members listed on the masthead. We acknowledge the support of all of these individuals, working with SAGE Publications, as we move through the midpoint of our commemoration year.
We reiterate the resolve to make this commemoration the opportunity to put on the Janus head of looking back at our publication history as well as forward to the publication milieu that will come in the decades ahead. After moving from established and emerging nutrition research achievements to a projection of the future in Latin America in the first issue offering, 4 Shweta Khandelwal and Anura Kurpad of the St Johns National Academy of Health Science in Bangalore, India, covers the same sequence for the Asian continent. 5