Food Consumption Statistics

Question

We have a graduate student looking for Canadian food consumption data from the 1990s by region/province and listed by major food groups (e.g grains/cereals, vegetables, dairy etc).

To help with the query these are the questions he/she wants answered:
1. which province drank the most milk in the 1990's
2. which province spends the most money or has the best access to fruits and vegetables

Will be grateful if anyone help with ideas where we can find information to address the above query.

Answer

There were 3 Family food expenditure surveys conducted by STC during the 1990s: 1990, 1992, and 1996. The DLI ftp site has summary tables, in Excel format, from the 1990 survey, as well as the public use microdata files from all three surveys (in the 'foodex' subdirectory). Summary file ffe90tab2.xls does a breakdown of expenditure by province and major food group. It would be, I think, a fairly simple matter to duplicate that table from the other two surveys. The summary file for each year will, it appears, contains only expenditure by major food group; the detailed item files contain expenditure and quantity.