The objective of this paper is to gain a better understanding of recent household food consumption patterns in Japan by focusing on the effects of family scale and taste for food as well as the price and income responses. The price and expenditure elasticities as well as the scale coefficient and biased measures of changes in taste in household food consumption are estimated using the linear-approximated, almost ideal demand system. The system is applied to the 1980–2007 period using the time series of cross-sectional family budget data by age group of household head. The main findings from the empirical results of this study imply that the household food consumption has mostly inelastic price and expenditure responses, and the effect of a change in taste for food strongly depends on the age of household head. In addition, the effect of family scale in household food consumption is also investigated.