The publication in 1912 of the book La Classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie. Recherches sur la hiérarchie des besoins dans les sociétés industrielles contemporaines (Paris, Félix Alcan) by Maurice Halbwachs, sealed the analysis of food consumption as a tool for a sociology of social classes. This article provides an original and documented inventory which gathers all the written and oral contributions (between 1907 and 1937) by Maurice Halbwachs on the subject of family budgets surveys. It shows how his main contributions fall within three key moments in the history of food consumption statistics. They foreshadow each time a reorientation of the forms taken by the surveys and contribute to the questions in force in the interwar period, at the international level, on the issue of «standard», i.e. food surveys and food consumption standards.