Measuring food consumption

F ood consumption surveys aim at determining the nutritional value of the diet The standard approach (I) consists in weighing the total amount of foodstuffs used for cooking in a number of families, which implies that a team of local assistants has to be hired and trained. This method is the most accurate but very costly as it has to be applied to a sufficiently large sample and be repeated to take account of seasonal variations. In southern Cameroon, in each of the forest populations, Yassa, Mvae and Kola Pygmies, a sample of at least 30 families were visited at three characteristic periods of the year. As these communities respect a weekly schedule, it was necessary to weigh their food consumption for seven consecutive days (resulting in a total of 1,900 survey days), and to estimate with reasonable accuracy the amount of food consumed in between meals. In the Central African Republic, in order to simplify this method, the total amount of food entering a Ngbaka village was weighed at characteristic periods of the seasonal cycle, and, at the same time, food consumption was measured in a small subsample of families. This method. derived from one that Lee (2) used with the Kalahari hunter-gatherers, allows a global estimate of the food consumption of a community to be made. As we are interested in individual food consumption, a methodological problem arises when. as happens frequently (see chapter 5), several persons eat food from the same dish. A fast electronic scale connected to a micro computer permitted the accurate assessment