His method was criticised chiefly for the choice of goods and services (other than food) in the basket. Orshansky calculated her poverty threshold by multiplying by three the cost of a minimum food budget - as determined in the Economy Food Plan - for different family sizes. She borrowed the multiplier of “3” from the Department of Agriculture’s 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey, which estimated that families of three or more spent about one-third of their income (after tax) on food in that year. This poverty threshold is still indexed every year to the consumer price index and has not changed in any major way since it was initially formulated (Orshansky, 1965,1969). One is the unit of analysis retained, i.e. the family.