Budgetary surveys of the quantities of food obtained for consumption by whole households cannot by their very nature give direct information about the diets of individuals. This may not matter to economists; to nutritionists it is a most serious limitation. There is only one small but important group of households, those consisting of one person, for whom it is prima facie possible to use budgetary records to assess actual food consumption. Some early National Food Survey records indicated that such assessments were valid. The winter of 1947-8 was one of privation, judged by current British standards. Bread and potatoes, which had been freely available throughout the war, were both rationed, and during the previous year the people as a whole had lost weight (Kemsley, 1953) and complained publicly about the food supply (Harries & Hollingsworth, 1953). The continuous survey of the diets of urban working-class households begun in 1940 was therefore suspended for 6 months (October 1947-March 1948) to allow the field workers to concentrate on those groups most likely to be affected by the shortages, especially heavy manual workers' households and old-age pensioners living alone. The sample in each group was augmented by a small initial sample of households providing fresh personal contacts for survey in the neighbourhood. The defects of the method are obvious (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food: National Food Survey Committee, 1956, Appendix D), but a rapid survey of very restricted groups could hardly have been made otherwise. The initial sample of pensioners was based on registrations for additional tea for those over 70 years of age, but some of the added pensioners were in their sixties. The resulting sample contained 508 women aged over 60 years: the energy values of their food consumption, estimated from their own

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