Excerpt from the report Preface: A considerable body of information on U. S. food consumption has been developed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture during the last 25 years. Estimates of annual data on per capita consumption of all major foods and several overall measures of food consumption, published regularly by the Agricultural Marketing Service prior to April 1961, are now issued by the Economic Research Service. In earlier publications such estimates and appraisals of the results have been described. This bulletin goes one step further: (1) It considers the concepts underlying alternative economic measures of overall food consumption, both through time and among major population groups at one point in time; and (2) it describes special procedures developed for analysis of problems related to food consumption.