From the Editor: Welcome New Additions to Food Quality & Safety

Food Quality & Safety magazine has a new contributor: The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). The organization will be providing content for the new Did You Know? column. I have been a member of this group for years and been peripherally involved for even longer. The organization has a large group called the Board of Scientific Advisors that helps ACSH develop its position papers. My mother, Dr. Elizabeth Fleming Stier, was a member of this group when she was on the Food Science faculty at Rutgers, so I was actually exposed to its work many years ago. I’ve also used the ACSH’s Thanksgiving Holiday Menu document over the years as a teaching aid. This tongue-in-cheek piece describes a typical Thanksgiving dinner and highlights the toxins that occur naturally in each item on the menu. It harks back to the “father of toxicology” Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) who coined the phrase, “only the dose makes the poison.” This 500-year-old statement holds true today yet it seems to have been forgotten in the fearmongering with regard to foods and chemicals that takes place in today’s world.

My fellow industry editor Dr. Purnendu C. Vasavada and I are also very pleased with our new Editorial Advisory Panel and thank each and every one of them for volunteering to help out and move the magazine forward. We have also recruited a group of persons from industry and academia to act as regular columnists for the magazine. These persons will start contributing in our next issue, the December/January issue. The columns will focus on current technical issues pertaining to food safety, food defense, regulatory compliance, and customer/consumer issues. We want these columnists to be creative and will allow them to get up on a “soap box” if need be.

We are excited at the direction we are going and look to you, our readers, to let us know not only how we are doing but how we can do better.

Richard Stier
Co-Industry Editor