Ecology of Food and Nutrition is an international journal of the nutritional sciences in the broadest sense. It emphasizes foods and food systems and their utilization to satisfy human nutritional needs, but it also examines nonfood factors that contribute to the spectrum of nutritional conditions, such as obesity and leanness, malnutrition, vitamin requirements, and mineral needs. The content scope is thus wide; articles may consider dietary and nutritional status issues arising from cultural prohibitions, traditional usages, and problems of marketing and transportation. Food nutrients and toxicants, additives, and food quality are also topics considered, as are ethnobotany, agriculture, and development.

 

Many of the journal's contributors are trained in nutrition, nutritional science, and food technology, but the behavioral and social sciences, including psychology, geography, and economics, are also represented, as are the food industry and its critics. Questions of taste, flavor, and acceptability are as germane to the journal as interactions among nutrition and environment, infection, physical fitness, pregnancy, child health, problems of aging, and cross-cultural comparisions.

 

An anthropologist may write on food behaviors, affecting health, and food utilization in a particular culture, while a planner may discuss policy implications of specific nutritional problems. Emphasis may be broad and complex, or specifically defined. Thus the perspective of the journal is ecological and holistic in its treatment of food and nutrition issues, and represents a wide range of disciplines, separately or combined.