For the first time since the Philippine government declared a national policy on nutrition some thirty years ago, it has sought an assessment of the country's nutrition plans and programs.

The author describes and analyzes, in a thoughtful ad authoritative manner, the advances and shortfalls in the country's thinking and efforts to address the long-standing, widespread, and layered problem of malnutrition in infants, children, adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, adults, and the elderly. She puts forward recommendations for reflection and action, on both specific and broad fronts. While recognizing the reality of an increasingly borderless world, she calls for the country to address its nutritional situation with the national interest in mind.

And yet, in a general sense, the book is as much about many other countries in both the East and West as it is about the Philippines. In the global community, it is estimated that 800 million people are food insecure and 170 million young children suffer from undernourishment. Given the present rate of progress, the internationally set Millennium Development Goal of reducing hunger and malnutrition by half by the year 2015 cannot conceivably be reached.

The book is also as much about the past as it is of the present and future(s) of nutrition on the Philippines and the nutritional well-being of the Filipinos. The country's nutritionscape is a canvas where history, governance and culture, economics, education, science, health, technology, agriculture, industry and international relation meet and interface. Still to be given preeminence is the human right to food and health.