The name is absent

H. Mori et al. /International Food and Agribusiness Management Review 3 (2000) 189-205

Table 1

Mean intakes per person per day, by age, 1989-91

Source: Interagency Board for Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research, Third Report on Nutrition Moni-
toring in the United States, Appendix, VA-68.

Original Source: USDA Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals, 1989-91.

Consumption of any food product is influenced by the structure of age and cohort
membership of population and period and their interactions (Nakamura, 1995). The period
effects involve economic factors, such as income and prices, and noneconomic factors, such
as health consciousness and “westernization,” for example, in Japan.

In the past four decades, Japanese food consumption has been studied extensively by
traditional demand theory analyses, single commodity approach at the earlier stages (Yuize,
1971; Dyck, 1988; to name a few), and the demand system approach in the more recent years
(Sasaki, 1987; Hayes et al., 1990; Mori & Lin, 1990, to name a few). There have appeared
lately some suspicions among noted Japanese economists that the traditional approach by
means of economic factors may have become less effective in clarifying Japanese food
consumption patterns which seem to have reached “maturity” (Tokoyama & Egaitsu, 1994;
Tokoyama, 1995).

In 1979, the Japanese government Management and Coordination Agency (MCA) began
publishing consumption data by the age groups of head of household (HH) in the Family
Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES). Mori and Inaba (1997) developed a unique meth-
odology to estimate individual consumption of family members by age by incorporating the
age structure of families by HH age groups into the model. Their approach, indirect in nature
and far from perfection, is unquestionably superior to the traditional method of simply
dividing household consumption by HH age groups by respective number of family members
(Mori, 1998).

With the individual consumption estimates available by 15 age classes, 0-4, 5-9, . . . ,
65- 69, and 70 and over, for the past 20 years, a cohort analysis of Japanese food consump-
tion is attempted in this study. Lewis et al. (1997) and Mori (1998) have already shown
statistically that older Japanese consume more traditional products such as rice, fish and sake
than younger Japanese, whereas the latter consume more nontraditional products, such as
bread, beef and beer than the former. They perceived age in a broad sense and did not
explicitly separate it into age in a narrow sense, or “pure age” and generation, or cohort
membership (Schrimper, 1979, pp. 1059 - 60). They tried to trace changes in consumption of

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