Many mornings when I was young, on days when I didn’t have a good book and when I’d exhausted whatever outdated copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer happened to be floating around the kitchen, I’d find myself reading the back of a cereal box. I’m quite sentimental and I’m quite skeptical of technology, but even I cannot claim that this was more beneficial than staring at a phone, and it was certainly less interesting.
And so, courtesy of Cheerios, I have the original food pyramid seared into my mind. I remember the illustrations of bread loaves and pasta, grapes, broccoli, Swiss cheese and a whole roast chicken, all apparently floating in the infinity of space. Despite the helpful key in the corner It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that what my bleary adolescent mind had taken to be stars were actually tiny circles and triangles intended to convey that all of the different categories contained some measure of sugar or fat.
The pyramid came under quite a bit of scrutiny over the years. There were small quibbles: isn’t it better to be at the top of a pyramid than the bottom? Why are these foods suspended in the void? But there were also more substantial critiques, especially the point that the base of the pyramid, the bread, cereal, rice and pasta group that was supposed to make up the largest portion of a diet, happened to contain many of the processed foods that General Mills and all the other food conglomerates wanted to sell to the American people.
In 2005 the pyramid was rebranded MyPyramid and given a redesign. Now each segment extended from the base to the peak, a human figure climbing steps along one side was added, and the various food categories, despite having larger or smaller slices of the whole, were given color coded name boxes that made them all appear to be equally important. A confusing jumble of foods sat at the base. It was a much worse graphic and no one remembers it.
In 2011 the whole pyramid idea was quietly put out of its misery, giving way to the MyPlate era. Instead of a pyramid, this consisted of a circle divided into quadrants labelled ‘fruits,’ 'vegetables,’ ‘protein’ and ‘grains,’ with a smaller circle of dairy off to the side. So blandly forgettable was this graphic that in the 2020s health influencers were still regularly railing against the food pyramid, a formulation the government hadn’t used in over a decade, rather the circle that had replaced it.
Now the food pyramid is back, and it’s been literally turned upside down. The new formulation gets one thing absolutely right: it is titled “Eat Real Food” and everything pictured is in fact a whole food.
But I wish it had stopped at that message rather than consigning grains to the tip (or is it bottom?) of the pyramid. We can all have our opinions about what exactly constitutes the healthiest diet, and we should all be free to eat it. Meanwhile, the government should promote the one, clear, unambiguous message that unprocessed food is always better than processed, without wading into what specific quantities of what specifics foods people should eat.