Family Food Consumption and Dietary Levels: Five Regions

Farm Series

1941

National Agricultural Library

U.S. Department of Agriculture. Miscellaneous Publication Number 405

Food-consumption patterns of different population groups are of interest not only to families wishing to improve their levels of living and to persons engaged in the production and marketing of food materials, but to all that are concerned with the Nation's broad social and economic problems. Diet can play an important role in the conservation of human resources, and food is a major part of any study of national, regional, or community production and consumption.

Information regarding the diets of farm families living in different parts of the United States was obtained as part of the 1935-36 study of consumer purchases. This report, one in a series for that study as a whole, considers the relationships between income and family composition on the one hand, and the money value of food, both farm- furnished and purchased, programs of food production for household use, and the quantities consumed of different types of food, on the other. This report also discusses the nutritive value of farm family diets and their probable adequacy from the nutritional viewpoint.

The farm families included in this study of consumption were limited to those in which there was a husband and wife, both native- born, and to white families in all regions except the Southeast, where a separate study of Negroes was made. Only those families were included that had not moved during the year covered by the study and that operated the farms they owned or rented (except in the South- east, where special studies were also made of families of sharecroppers. None had received relief during the report year.

The eligibility requirements just mentioned and others, minor in character, served to eliminate from this investigation relatively more of the families with low incomes in each community than of those in the higher income classes. Common observation and special studies of the excluded groups indicate that native-white, unbroken, non- relief families generally are in better circumstances than those groups omitted from this study, i. e., the foreign-born and the broken families, those receiving relief, the one-person and the very large families, Negro families (separate analyses of Negro families were made in the Southeast), farm laborers (sharecroppers, however, were studied separately in the Southeast), and those that had moved during the report year. The differences between the group studied and the total population should be recognized in using the expenditure and consumption data of this volume. (See Methodology, Data from the Consumption Sample (Expenditure Schedules).)

The farm sample studied was obtained from five broad geographic regions — New England, Middle Atlantic and North Central, Plains and Mountain, Pacific, and Southeast. 1 Within these regions farm sections were chosen on the basis of the type of agriculture predominating or widely prevalent. Fourteen types of farming, each important in the Nation's agriculture, were selected for representation.

The farm sections were chosen on a national and regional basis rather than State ; small groups of counties selected because of the importance of a specific type of farming would not necessarily be representative of the major type of agriculture, or of the income received from agriculture, in the State in which they were located.