The AOAC Stakeholder Panel on Infant Formula and Adult Nutritionals (SPIFAN) defined fat-soluble vitamins (FSVs) to include vitamins A, D, E, and K. The levels of FSVs have been closely scrutinized because of a number of factors, including nutrition value especially in foods used to provide sole-source nutrition and the potential for health risks associated with content both below and above recommended levels. Stricter scrutiny and emphasis on nutrient-level compliance with regulatory requirements placed an increased demand on analytical methods that were fit-for-purpose, provided accurate and precise results. Over time, compendial methods have been developed and published by organizations such as AOAC INTERNATIONAL, the European Committee for Standardization, the International Dairy Federation, and the International Organization for Standardization, among others. In general, these methods have shown adequate precision for regulatory compliance based on example food matrixes for which they were designed. However, method evaluation for infant formulas and adult nutritional products was limited to very few matrixes within these categories. As such, method applicability gaps were noted and correlated with more complicated or diverse product matrixes. AOAC undertook the task of modernizing test methods for the determination of nutrients in infant formulas and in adult nutritional products formulated specifically for both healthy adults and those requiring specific nutritional intake. Composition of products in this category continued to evolve, which in turn presented increasing and new challenges to analytical methodology. A summary of a new generation of candidate compendial methods for determination of FSVs in these matrixes, identified by SPIFAN, is presented here.

This essay posits a necessary relationship between Dickinson’s religious concerns and her textual practice that Dickinson scholarship has not previously considered. This relationship is the foundation of a poetics that synthesizes philosophical materialism and religious transcendence. Skeptical about the merits of an eternity in “Paradise,” Dickinson retains an attachment to the world and a readiness to accept bodily death as the end of all life, as revealed in “Paradise is of the Option - ” (Fr1125). A textual problem with this poem in turn raises the question of what, in its essence, constitutes a “poem” by Emily Dickinson: is it primarily a material entity (the textpage) with which ideas are then associated, or is it primarily an abstract entity (the “Poem”), consisting in a set of ideas for which the written words and the paper are the medium? Any written verbal literary expression creates a dialectic between a textual artifact and its aesthetic properties. In Dickinson’s poetics, this dialectic is focused to an unusual and exemplary degree, as her conceptions of world and God, the material and the metaphysical, death and immortality, are inseparable from her conceptions of poem and text, of aesthetic entity and material artifact. She thus creates a meta-dialectic that encompasses artifact/world/death and God/aesthetic entity/immortality. To track these ideas in detail, this essay pays close attention to three poems that have religious subject matter (and frequent Christian allusions) but differing textual origins: “A word made Flesh is seldom” (Fr1715), “Of Paradise’ existence” (Fr1421), and “No Crowd that has occurred” (Fr653), concluding that for Dickinson the textpage (as material existent) gives embodiment to and fulfills the poem, and the poem (as spirit) breathes vitality into the textpage (as body).