Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.Background and coverage over time: The National Food Survey (NFS), which ran from 1974-2000, was the longest-running continuous survey of household food consumption and expenditure in the world. It was originally set up in 1940 by the then Ministry of Food to monitor the adequacy of the diet of urban 'working class' households in wartime, but it was extended in 1950 to become representative of households throughout Great Britain (the UK Data Archive holds NFS data from 1974-2000 only). In 1996 the survey was extended to cover Northern Ireland. The NFS provided a wealth of information which made a major contribution to the study of the changing patterns of household food consumption. About 8,000 households took part in the NFS each year. The household member who did most of the food shopping was asked some questions about the household and its food purchasing. They were then asked to keep a diary for seven days, recording food coming into the household, including quantities and expenditure, and some detail of the household meals (including snacks and picnics prepared from household supplies). From 2001, the NFS and Family Expenditure Survey were merged into the Expenditure and Food Survey (now the Living Costs and Food Survey) (LCF). The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), is now responsible for the 'Family Food' component of the LCF. Open access NFS datasets now available: In 2016, as part of a programme to widen public access to data, DEFRA published open access versions of the 1974-2000 NFS data. They contain less detailed data than these standard End User Licence versions. For example, the open access datasets only contain household-level data and not person-level data (though some person data fields have been extracted and are supplied as a new table so that details of whether anyone in the household was pregnant at the time of the survey, and whether there were any children under the age of 2). Furthermore, age has been banded, and head of household's gross income and records for households with more than 10 members have been removed. The open access datasets are available to download without registration from the UK Data Service under SN 7945 - National Food Survey, 1974-2000: Open Access Data and also from the data.gov.uk Family Food open data webpage. Further details of changes made to the open access data and information on the project is described on the DEFRA blog, Feeding the hunger for data.
For the third edition, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA - previously the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF)) supplied weighting factors for the data.
Main Topics:Each household which participated in the NFS did so voluntarily, and without payment, for one week only. By regularly changing the households surveyed, information was obtained continuously throughout the year except for a short break at Christmas. Each household was provided with a specially designed log-book in which the person principally responsible for domestic food arrangements provided information about each household. The main diary-keeper kept a record each day for seven days, with guidance from an interviewer, of all food entering the home intended for human consumption. Information about characteristics of the household and of its members was recorded on a separate questionnaire.
One-stage stratified or systematic random sample
For details see documentation.
Face-to-face interview
Expenditure diaries
