Did you know that the Food Pyramid of our youth has been obliterated? Apparently it's been this way since 2005, a fact I must have missed while I was getting my PhD in nutrition. Foodies like my fiancée Samantha, who owns a kid's cooking business, probably like the changes since they allow for more personalization and modern nutritional insight. But I'd just like to point out that the pyramids of Ancient Egypt were built using old fashioned blocks (ditto for Lego pyramids I used to build on the living room floor) -- a fact that the new Food Pyramid blithely ignores.
The biggest problem is that they've changed all the food groups. In the past, heroic food groups like Meat and Grains were awarded expansive blocks wherein they could display their delicious bounties: waving amber wheat stalks, slabs of bacon, a meaty cut of pork. Now all that's gone, replaced by a geeky online system that customizes a pyramid for everybody based on a host of factors specific to the individual. The awestriking has been replaced by algorithms. That's about as heroic as Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs in an arm-wrestling match.
Isn't this the kind of change that should have gone to a national referendum? It's a disgrace, we shouldn't have to take this kind of intrusion into our lives. The resulting block-less shape isn't an honest pyramid, it's a triangle searching for identity. Meat doesn't even have its own category, it now shares real estate with the laughingstock Beans group (suffering from ever-present "magical fruit" taunts) and has equal stature as new categories such as Discretionary Calories and Physical Activity. Excuse me, but unless I unknowingly gave myself a lobotomy with a meat cleaver, I don't think those two categories have anything to do with actual, you know, food or the consumption of same.
I choose to base my understanding of the Pyramid on how I encountered it in my youth: laminated and unchanged for time immemorial (like the Declaration of Independence) as it resided in a cluttered corner of my gym teacher's bulletin board. We hold these truths to be self-evident...that i can eat a wicked huge amount of corn byproduct and spare ribs because the beloved old school Food Pyramid chart said so.
did you also know that cookies are now just a "sometimes" food for the eponymous monster on Sesame Street? No wonder he's blue...(har dee har har)
Posted by: Thea | July 18, 2008 at 01:24 PM
Hey Thea,
That's awful! Kids are missing out...they're even going back to santize old version of Seasame Street. Boo hoo indeed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Seth
Posted by: Seth Barnes | July 18, 2008 at 07:14 PM