Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
Background and coverage over time: The National Food Survey (NFS) was originally set up in 1940 to monitor the adequacy of the diet of urban working class households. It evolved into a continuous sampling enquiry into the domestic food consumption and expenditure of all private households, regardless of class. These data cover the period 1974-2000, when the NFS and Family Expenditure Survey were merged into the Expenditure and Food Survey (now the Living Costs and Food Survey). At the beginning of the series (1974) the survey covered England, Scotland and Wales only. It excluded food purchased to be eaten outside the home (such as fish and chips, ice cream), and excluded all confectionery, soft drinks, and alcoholic drinks that might be purchased by anyone other than the 'housewife'. In 1992 confectionery, alcoholic drinks and soft drinks brought home for consumption were added to the survey, and in 1994 an additional survey was begun to extend the NFS coverage to food eaten outside the home. From 1996, the NFS was extended to cover Northern Ireland. Open access data released: In 2016, as part of a programme to widen public access to data, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) published open access versions of the 1974-2000 NFS data. The open access datasets contain less detail than the standard End User Licence NFS datasets which are available only to registered UK Data Service users. 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 process is described in the documentation and on the DEFRA blog, Feeding the hunger for data. Downloading the Open Access Data The Open Access NFS data can be downloaded in tab-delimited text (.txt) format by following the link in the 'Download' section below. The zip file contains data and documentation for all NFS surveys from 1974-2000. Open access NFS datasets for all years (or individual survey years) can also be freely downloaded from the data.gov.uk Family Food open data webpage.
Purposive selection/case studies
Original source NFS data have been used, but households with more than 10 members have been removed
Compilation or synthesis of existing material
