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Abstract
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.