Recent studies of the economic aspects of food consumption by farm, village and city families emphasize the necessity for revising the units commonly used in measuring the demand for food. very nature of the problem makes the formation of such units extremely difficult, but the rapid development of the science of nutrition in the last quarter century makes it possible to improve the measures now in use. A history of the development of these measures will clarify the problem. earliest students of food consumption were content to base their calculations on the amount of food consumed, and food expenditure per family. difficulties involved in thus comparing family with family without further analysis were soon recognized, however, and the careful students of consumption devised various methods of remedying the situation. International Statistical Congress of 1853 recommended using figures from typical families only. In 1875, Carrol D. Wright, then Chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, published the results of a survey of the earnings and expenditures of 397 Massachusetts wage-earning families. general summaries of the data gathered show that the average family surveyed consisted of 5.14 persons, and the more detailed tables give separate figures for families consisting of 2 adults; 2 adults, 1 child; 2 adults, 2 children; and so on up to families with 2 adults, and 6 children.' (One would judge that families which included dependent adults were not brought into the investigation.) In 1887 Ernst Engel proposed to elaborate a scale determining the rank of consumers, based on the money value of the annual consumption of persons of different ages.2 In 1891 when Wright, as United States Commissioner of Labor, was in charge of a study of the cost of living of workers in certain industries throughout the United States, a new method of measuring the demand for food was worked out. Under the heading The consumption of food in normal families, the 1891 report 3 reads: It is evidently improper to compare family with family, for one family may consist of a husband and wife and one child, and another of a husband and wife and two, three, four or five children. Units of consumption have therefore been