OPP in the conduct of its dietary risk assessments for pesticides is most interested in consumption of food commodities in the form of ingredients such as beef, wheat flour, tomato sauce, soybean oil, etc rather than foods "as eaten" (e.g., lasagna). While the NHANES "What We Eat in America" survey provides extensive, statistically representative information on food consumption for approximately 10,000 surveyed individuals for each 2-year survey cycle, information on food commodity consumption with foods expressed in terms of ingredients is not present. As a result, the FCID was developed for use by EPA and other organizations when conducting exposure assessments on an "ingredient" or "food commodity" basis. FCID was developed using reported intakes from CSFII (1994-96/1998) and WWEIA (currently 2003-2008) which were translate to a food commodity basis. Specifically: the FCID uses recipe files (aka 100 grm files) to break down all foods into their agricultural commodity equivalents. For example, what was reported by a WWEIA survey respondent as a 1/8 slice of a 12" pepperoni pizza would be converted in FCID to gram amounts of wheat flour, beef, milk (reflecting the cheese) tomato sauce, soybean oil, etc. for that respondent. Of course, all the demographic information associated with that respondent as collected by CSFII or NHANES such as socio-economic status, age, race/ethnicity, etc. and other information such as body weight and other anthropological measurements is also retained with that record. FCID also contains additional information with respect to the cooked status (yes/no), cooking method (baked, broiled, fried, etc.) and food form (fresh, frozen, canned, pickled, etc.) of the ingredients, information that is not available in CSFII or WWEIA.

In addition to its direct applications in dietary exposure assessment, WWEIA-FCID 2003-08 also offers the following capabilities.

• A point-and-click user interface that makes the underlying data more accessible , as well as raw data files is .csv format which can be imported into a variety of database and statistical software programs
• The ability to determine which food commodities (ingredients) are present in a given food or which foods contain a given food commodity, and their respective amounts or proportions as well as cooked status (yes/no), cooking method (baked, boiled, fried, etc.) and food form (fresh, frozen, dried, canned, etc.).
• The ability to "match" U.S. EPA FCID (crop group) codes for agricultural commodities and their crop group codes to their associated Codex codes and descriptions.
• The ability to generate estimates of mean and various percentile consumption values of a given food commodity for the total population and various user-defined age and racial/ethnic subgroups. This can be done on both a per capita and "eaters only" basis and can be output in both a absolute gram and gram/kg b.w. basis.

In sum, WWEIA-FCID 2003-08 translates food consumption as reported eaten in WWEIA (1999-08 survey cycles) and CSFII (1994-96, 1998) surveys into consumption of U.S. EPA-defined food commodities. Such food commodity intakes are expressed as grams of food commodity consumed per kg bodyweight per day for over 500 commodities derived from more than 6000 different foods and beverages reported in the two surveys. The database is intended to complement the CSFII and NHANES/WWEIA databases in that it reports food consumption as commodities as opposed to foods "as eaten" per se which can in some exposure and other situations be of more utility. The database also includes WWEIA 2003-08 food consumption and demographic data that is available through CDC's National Center for Health Statistics at this page.