United States demand for food and nutrition in the twentieth century

A new method to estimate and measure the primary economic forces that influence the demand for food and nutrients is proposed. The method is based on an incomplete demand system that extends Gorman's class of exactly aggregable demand models and that nests the functional forms that income and prices take in the model's specification. This empirical model generates a complete time series of annual estimates of food and nutrient price and income elasticities for the period 1919-2000, excluding World War II.