Excerpt from the report Objectives and Scope: Surveys of food consumed by various groups in the population give a broad, over-all picture of the nutritive content of family diets, but reveal little about the diets of individual family members. Diet surveys of individuals, on the other hand, have seldom covered representative samples of important segments of the population. To provide more information about the diets of such a sample of individuals, data on the food consumed by homemakers were obtained as a supplementary part of the family surveys made in Birmingham, Ala., Buffalo, N. Y., Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., and San Francisco, Calif., in the winter of 1948. This publication presents findings on the diets of approximately 1,000 homemakers who furnished estimates of the quantities of foods they ate during the 24-hour period preceding the time they were interviewed. Since information was obtained for each meal and for food eaten between meals, whether eaten at home or away, this study shows the distribution of nutrients both among the meals of the day and between food eaten at home and away from home.