Go to a big city supermarket and survey the food selection.
There is a vast supply of ”American” foods, of course, but an impressive selection of foreign and ethnic foods, too. Fixings for tacos. Bean paste for Chinese. Armenian bread. Pita bread. Chick peas for making hummos. Huge bags of rice and of beans. Curry spices for Indian food.
There are a couple of reasons that these foods are showing up in larger and larger amounts in some stores. One is that ethnic foods are popular. But the more interesting reason is that immigrants and ethnic groups are becoming a larger part of the nation`s population.
Whether they come to the U.S. from the Pacific Rim, Mexico or Africa, from India or from any of hundreds of other places, immigrants bring their culture and, of course, their best recipes, which helps create the demand for ingredients.
The specific degree of that growth in ethnic minorities is only one small, but important, development that will be measured and revealed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The count is already under way on several fronts, although the formal kickoff is April 1, Census Day.
Collecting census figures every decade may be one of the most important things the federal government does in peacetime. Required by the Constitution, the tally is the foundation for the distribution of about $38 billion in federal funds to various government programs at the state and local level.
It is also a chance for the United States to measure itself, applying the best figures that can be collected to a whole range of assumptions and theories about population.
The census also produces the numbers that state legislatures need to redraw the lines of congressional districts to reflect shifts in population. This census, for example, will lead to a decline in congressional districts in the Midwest and Northeast and an increase in seats in the South and the West. There are always battles over census results.
The difference this time is that the disputes have already begun, even before the Census Bureau`s computers have counted the first set of responses. Various interest groups are complaining that the urban poor will be undercounted, for example, which means cities could be shorted on federal funds for various programs. And there seems to be no end to the spats over the attempt to count the homeless.
The process of watching the growth and movement of the U.S. population has been so well-honed by government and private business that virtually everyone in the population game knows almost exactly what the 1990 census data will show.
”The census probably won`t discover anything spectacular at the national level,” says John Kennedy, a former Cen-
sus Bureau researcher who is co-director of Indiana University`s Center for Survey Research.
”But at the local level, a growing suburb may not realize that its population has doubled until it gets census returns . . . Things change slowly. It`s not often that they find something that is a big surprise.”
But the likelihood that most surprises will be local in nature hasn`t dampened enthusiasm for census results.
There is a simple reason for all of that interest: America lives on numbers.
Statistics about the marketplace fill the business sections of its newspapers. Marketing decisions of every stripe depend on the accurate collection of data in target areas. Empires are constructed on demographics.
The refinements and variations on the census theme-counting the numbers and searching for meaning-are fascinating.
One company, Standard Rate & Data Service in Wilmette, going far beyond mere tabulation, has developed a huge book that provides in-depth assessments of every potential marketplace in the U.S.
It can tell you more than you would ever want to know about places from Abilene to Zanesville. Everything from salaries and types of employment to how people use their free time is covered in the massive ”Lifestyle Market Analyst.”
The median income in Chicago, for example, is $31,438. About 21 percent of the population doesn`t have credit cards. About 24 percent shop by catalog, and 33 percent enjoy gardening.
About a fifth of the population goes fishing frequently, while 13 percent of all households describe themselves as interested in the environment and protection of wildlife.
If you are among those who have noticed the change in selection at the supermarket, perhaps you live in an area that has become popular with immigrants. About a tenth of Chicago`s population falls into the Asian, Hispanic or Other categories.
Almost all of these attempts to measure America depend to some degree on census data. The census may also serve as a correcting mechanism for a society`s image of itself.
The assumption not so long ago that everyone wanted the same things-a father with a white-collar job, a suburban home with a gray and pink kitchen, a station wagon, two kids, a cute dog and a stay-at-home wife-collapsed in the face of the realities of census statistics collected in 1970 and 1980.
The increasingly important role that women are playing in the economy may someday be viewed as one of the most important developments measured by census statistics toward the end of the 20th Century.
By the time all of the Census Bureau`s studies and reports have been issued over the next decade, a new statistical picture will emerge of the 250 million people who live in America.
It won`t look much like the America of 1960 or 1970. The problems society has been wrestling with for the past decade will be defined somewhere in the numbers, perhaps hidden within various obscure categories, but present nonetheless.
Collapsing marriages, crime, economic troubles, birthrates, infant mortality, the problems of the aging; one way or another, they will exist either in actual numbers, or through analysis of the numbers, in the U.S. Census.
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Some of the results are going to make some people uncomfortable. For romantics, census results can be a bucket of cold water in the face.
If traditional family values is your battle cry, for example, you will find precious little indication in the new census that the American family is anything at all like the family that lives somewhere in the nation`s mythology.
Two of every five women giving birth to their first babies were not married when they became pregnant. The Census Bureau`s 1988 statistics showed 11.7 percent got married before the child was born, and 28.3 percent were still unmarried when the baby arrived, a figure that has been increasing since 1970.
That`s not necessarily bad news. Census specialists believe some young mothers may be electing to have their babies and stay at home with their parents rather than risk a potentially unstable marriage to prevent a birth out of wedlock.
One aspect of the aging of the population has changed another measure of America`s view of itself. The typical household size is shrinking, down to just over 2 1/2 people in 1989.
Census demographers trace that change to families having fewer children, more young people setting up homes of their own and an increase in the number of elderly people maintaining their own households.
The census also will define a nation that remains literally on the move-al-
though less so than before-still pursuing whatever grail it is that makes an individual or a family pack up the furniture and head north, south, east or west.
Some items in this category just won`t seem to make much sense, unless you have been following the nature of nation`s shifting population. New Hampshire, for example, will be among the top five growth states in the U.S. for the 1980-1990 period.
Dr. William Fischel, an economics professor at Dartmouth University, says much of that growth can be traced to the sprawl around Boston, where rapidly growing suburbs have crossed state lines.
”What you`re picking up here is not so much the growth of a state as the growth of a suburban region,” he said.
There are no small matters when it comes to the U.S. census. It has been a tremendous instrument for tracking the growth of the nation, history played out in numbers.
If you go all the way back to the beginning, for example, census statistics show that in 1790, total U.S. population was 3.9 million and the center of population (literally the point at which the population split north and south, east and west) was 23 miles east of Baltimore.
The United States was basically a coastal nation. But not for long. Manifest destiny and the lust for land pushed the population westward.
By 1860, the center of population reached Ohio. Between 1880 and 1890, the center reached Indiana. By 1890, the census people were able to report that the push to the western frontier had ended.
By 1980, the center of population crossed the Mississippi River for the first time, hitting Jefferson County, Mo.
What the census produces more of than anything else is numbers.
Page after page. Computer tape after computer tape. The Bureau of the Census itself seems to delight in reciting numbers related to the collection of census facts.
Somewhere in Washington sits a person who knows that if you placed all of the pencils to be used in the 1990 census end to end, they would stretch 870 miles, from Atlanta to Des Moines or from Philadelphia to St. Louis. That is 9,360,000 pencils.
The Census Bureau notes it has hired 480,000 temporary employees to help carry out this task, assigning them to 516 regional temporary offices that, in floor space, are ”the equivalent of 2.2 Empire State Buildings or 4,972,000 square feet of office space.”
Someone knows that real furniture will not be used for this temporary task, and also that the cardboard furniture that will fill census offices includes 68,000 cardboard desks and 25,000 cardboard tables. There will be 75,000 folding chairs.