Pyramid schemes

The poor old Food Pyramid has gone from helpful to pointless to meaningless, and Bad Reporter is about as accurate in satirizing it as the USDA has been in improving it.

Despite how the newscasters derided it in the process of reading the USDA and FLOTUS press releases introducing the new whateverthehellitis on last night's news, the original Food Pyramid was a simple diagram with meaning that most people should have been able to grasp:

You start by creating a solid base for your diet with grains, then solidify that base with fruits and vegetables. Add protein through smaller portions of meat and dairy products, and then, at the tippy top, the treats: A sparing amount of fats and sweets.

A few years ago, however, I was writing a nutrional guide for kids and, in consulting with the client's nutritionist, learned that the Food Pyramid had been improved. She furnished me with the new, improved version of the Food Pyramid, which was clearly much better.

As you can see, they took out the difficult idea of creating a healthy base and then adding different types of food in order of importance and quantity.

They simply reduced the concept of proportions to colored, graphically incomprehensible stripes, which combined with the now-added concept of daily exercise, show that, the more you exercise, the less food you will eat, until you become physically fit and stop needing to eat at all.

This improvement apparently came at roughly the same time nutritionists stopped talking about "eating disorders" and began to talk about "disordered eating," so that they could remove the element of shame. No word on whether oncologists followed suit by talking about "disordered bumpiness" instead of saying "You have a tumor."

I'm not sure of the measurable pedagogical impact of these changes on the guide I was writing, but it was highly successful from my perspective in that the check did not bounce.

Now we have the new "My Plate," which, the USDA says, will remove the confusion caused by the Food Pyramid and reinforce the important concept that it's all about me.

And that the proper way to consume butter and cheese is to melt them and drink them from a glass. 

Don Asmussen's linkage of this new concept with the Vatican's recent revelation that pedophilia is a result of seminarians having grown sideburns and begun burnng incense outside of liturgical settings half a century ago is brilliant.

And, of course, he then extends the Papal connection to his third news item by asking the traditional theological question about Limbo: "How low can you go?"

Comments

[Sherwood]

This is brilliant, even by your standards.

However, I am now deeply worried that our secret overlords slipped up in their timeline: "My Plate" seems more rightly to be a product of the coming Palin administration than the current one, doesn't it?

[Sarah]

Very funny!