India - Household Consumer Expenditure, July 1993 - June 1994, NSS 50th Round

A 'meal' is composed of one or more readily eat­able (generally cooked) items of food, the usual major constitu­ent of which is cereals. The meals consumed by a person twice or thrice a day provide him/her the required energy (calories) and other nutrients for living and for pursuing his/her normal avoca­tions. A 'meal' opposed to 'snacks', 'nashta' or 'high tea' con­tains larger quantum and variety of food. In rare cases, a full meal may contain larger quantity of non-cereal food. Even then if the quantum of food in a plate is heavy as a meal, the cont­ents of the food food plate will also be considered as a 'meal'. Sometimes the contents of a 'nastha' may not be very different from the contents of a 'meal'. The difference in quantity will therefore be the guiding factor for deciding whether the plate is to be labeled as a 'meal' or a 'nastha'.

The number of meals consumed by a person is usually reported as 2 or 3. In rare cases, one may come across a person who may be taking food only once in a day or more than three times a day. While in the former case the number of meals for the person will be 1 per day, in the latter case, only 3 should be entered. That is, in this column, the recorded number of meals taken in a day even if it is reported to be higher, should not exceed 3. A breast-fed baby does not directly share the food consumed by members of the household. Hence for such babies the entry in this column will be '0'.