The National Food Survey of the United Kingdom and Comparisons With Other British and American Food Data

The National Food Survey has been a carefully watched gauge for both wartime and postwar British food administration. It has measured the successes and the failures of the policies and programs for maintaining equitable distribution of foods essential to the civilian population of the United Kingdom during the prolonged and grim struggle, first against the enemy, then on the hard road back to some semblance of economic recovery. Because the Survey was conducted only for administrative use, its detailed findings were not published until late 1951. Although such findings were always available to key American food officials, the inner workings of the Survey have been little known on this side of the Atlantic. Accordingly, while in England for independent research at Cambridge University in 1955-56, Miss Burk prepared a report for administrative use in the Agricultural Marketing Service; this was done with the wholehearted cooperation of administrators and technical personnel who were responsible for the Survey and its interpretation. In this article we publish nonconfidential information from the report and some further research notes on these and other comparable data. Although Miss Burk is indebted to a number of civil servants of Her Majesty's Government for extended and frank discussions of problems involved in the Survey, her article represents essentially preliminary research findings. The article is not an official statement of either Her Majesty's Government or the U. S. Department of Agriculture.