India - Household Consumer Expenditure, July 2000 - June 2001, NSS 56th Round

A 'meal' is composed of one or more readily eatable (generally cooked) items of food, the usually major constituent of which is cereals. The meals consumed by a person twice or thrice a day provide him/her the required energy (calorie) and other nutrients for living and for pursuing his/her normal avocations. A 'meal', as 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 plate will also be considered as a 'meal'. Sometimes the contents of a 'nashta' 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 labelled as a 'meal' or a 'nashta'.

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, however, 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'. To have a clear idea of what constitutes a meal, the following three paragraphs may be referred to.