THE NATIONAL Food Survey of Great Britain.

It is just 10 years since the Society devoted two full meetings to the subject of budgetary and dietary surveys. In the intervening period a further full meeting has been held in Dublin for the purpose of discussing the Irish National Nutrition Survey. But this is the first occasion on which it has been possible to present to the Society a connected series of papers covering various aspects of the National Food Survey of-Great Britain, an opportunity which my colleagues and I have very much welcomed. It would perhaps be appropriate in these introductory remarks to refer briefly to the purpose for which the survey was begun and to the changes in objective and coverage which have taken place since its commencement in 1940. The survey was not designed to provide information that would enhance scientific knowledge in its narrower sense. It was initiated, in the climate of the thirties, against a background of the poorer diets which prewar surveys had demonstrated in certain sections of the British population; and it was planned to provide administrators with early warnings of any dietary inadequacy that might result from wartime shortages and changes in dietary pattern, particularly among those who were thought to be nutritionally most vulnerable. In these circumstances it was assumed that the effectiveness of the wartime food policy would be most clearly reflected in the food consumption and expenditure of urban working-class households. With the termination of the war and the end of the immediate postwar shortages it became clear that, if the survey was to provide a basis for guidance on food policy that would take into account the changing circumstances of different groups of the population, its scope would need to be widened. Accordingly in 1950 the coverage was increased in such a way as to furnish records for a complete cross-section of the population, and thus to facilitate the pin-pointing of any groups whose diet appeared to need attention. During and immediately after the war it was not possible to analyse, in a form suitable for publication, the great mass of information that had been collected.