Jun 10, 2011 5 min read

 

It’s all the government’s fault.

(Worry not, dear reader; I’ve not gone all Tea Party on you.)

This time last year — actually, and completely coincidentally, it was 53 weeks ago today — I wrote a column about the unexpectedly bad foods found on restaurant menus. I bring this up because I started that column with the following statement: “I refuse to believe that white bread is bad for you.”

A little more than a year later, I know why I made such an easily refuted statement: the government told me so, way back in 1992, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled the Food Guide Pyramid.

The Food Pyramid, with its big base of grains, led me to believe that such foods have to be good for you — I mean, they’re literally the foundation of the pyramid, after all. Apparently, I wasn’t the only young person to be confused. (I’ll leave out my exact age in 1992, to avoid any backlash.)

“Nutritionists objected that it encouraged eating too many servings of grains and, therefore, encouraged obesity,” wrote Marion Nestle, a professor of (deep breath) Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and the author of “Food Politics,” “Safe Food,” “What to Eat”, and “Pet Food Politics.”

Of course, Nestle (who has one of the best names a person can have who studies food) was a lot bigger fan of the 1992 Pyramid than the “travesty” of an update that followed in 2005. In other words, when it came to trying to help us understand how to eat right, the government was batting .000.

Jump to last Thursday, when the USDA officially junked the pyramid altogether and unveiled the new food icon, MyPlate. (Does Apple get a kickback every time someone smashes a pronoun against a word without a space?)

MyPlate is a graphical representation of a plate (go figure) viewed from above, with roughly equal colored sections marking the amount of your plate should be given to fruits, grains, vegetables and proteins. There’s even a side circle (a cup, you can assume) for dairy products. A fork rests to the left of the plate, with nary a spoon or knife to be seen. (Does the fork represent iron in your diet? USDA reps did not return imaginary calls seeking this facetious clarification.)

Nestle and other nutritionists were, for the most part, pleased by the new icon. The image is starkly simplistic compared to the previous two pyramids, with no pictures of food items or numbers cluttering up the plate. (The image still somehow took two years to create.)

The goal, according to first lady Michelle Obama, was to make it easy enough a child could figure out. (One look at the busy mess of the 2005 Pyramid confirms this is a good decision.) Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says MyPlate aims to show that nutrition doesn’t have to be complicated.

One look at MyPlate makes one thing clear: Grains, the bane of my Food Pyramid experience, are now clearly diminished. No longer dominating the bottom of the pyramid, their orangish-brown section is roughly 20-30 percent of the plate.

I say roughly 20-30 percent because it is exactly that. The four food sections that occupy the plate are all roughly the same, with vegetables the only one noticeably larger than the rest. This, again, was part of plan, as MyPlate is supposed to be a guide or suggestion, rather than offering an exact ounce or percentage of each food group.

“[Parents] don’t have the time to measure out exactly three ounces of chicken or to look up how much rice or broccoli is in a serving,” Michelle Obama said. “We do have time to look at our kids’ plates.”

(We all have friends that do measure everything they eat, and if you don’t have one, trust me, no one likes these friends.)

I do have a few issues with the MyPlate image, notably that it doesn’t specify how many of those plates of food it’s saying we can eat. This being America and all, I think it might have been wise to make clear this wasn’t an all-you-can-eat buffet suggestion.

Television satirist Stephen Colbert, meanwhile, had a more existential complaint: “Americans don’t use plates anymore,” he said, with mock gravitas. “Our food comes from cases, bags, cans, tubes, and envelopes made of themselves.”

Still, despite these silly drawbacks, MyPlate beats the Pyramid. Let’s just hope that the new food icon helps to save this generation from believing for years that white bread is good for you only to be crushed later.

If that’s the case, we’ll be leaving behind a better world for our children than we had ourselves.

 

If you’d like to offer him dessert, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.