For years, Cameroon has been considered as self-sufficient in agricultural production and was able to feed its population. But in recent years, the Country experienced food shortage and starvation in some rural areas in its northern part. Our aim is to characterize households in food insecurity. A series of approaches are used to describe the multi-faceted dimensions of food insecurity. The objective of this paper is to measure and analyse food insecurity in the northern part of Cameroon using two approaches: score of dietary diversity and calorific contribution approach. The first approach is a simple counting of food groups consumed over a specific period and the second allows computing per capita dietary energy consumption for households or individuals. Both approaches result in classifying households into three categories according to food consumption level: acceptable, borderline, poor. Cameroon Households Survey 2007 (ECAM3), conducted from September to December 2007 in Twelve thousand households in Cameroon, is a database with information on detailed daily expenditures of households in food consumption for two weeks (Section 15 of the main questionnaire). We focus on data of the rural household of the northern part of Cameroon. These records serve to compute food security indicators related to the above two approaches using FAO Technical conversion factors for agricultural commodities. A distribution of household per capita dietary energy consumption for rural households in the northern part of Cameroon is proposed. We then compare the results obtained from the two approaches.