Michele points out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is re-thinking the whole Food Pyramid idea, and possibly contemplating some new geometric shape. Read the article, because it's hilarious: it says the Food Pyramid—first published in 1992—can't be working, because Americans are overweight. There are two fallacies at work there: 1) that people are eating the wrong foods in order to get overweight (perhaps they are eating too much in exactly the right proportions), and 2) that if people only understood what they ought to be eating, they wouldn't choose an unhealthy diet at all. The bureaucratic mindset is on parade here: no one, fully knowing the choices out there, would ever deliberately do anything wrong. This can, of course, apply to genocide as much as to gluttony—and to everything in between.

Michele has her own wickedly hilarious suggestion for a fresh approach to government guidelines, which you must go look at now.

Done? Did you read the comment by Crank? "How about a Food Sphinx, which dispenses only impenetrable riddles and offers no useful guidance?" Nice. He gets a link for that; I laughed out loud. And that certainly seems to be the government's policy; it holds across shapes.

After visiting Michele's place I started wondering whether I could remember the guidelines from when I was a kid, the ones that hung on at least one cafeteria hall in the 60s and 70s: The Basic Four Food Groups.

Meat and Dairy, Grains and Legumes, Fruits and Vegetables . . . what else? Hm. I started Googling to see if I could remember those guidelines, which I believe were developed in the 50s. Interestingly, there is no consensus now on what they were. Now, I might be able to find them somewhere, such as in my pre-1992 edition of The Joy of Cooking, but that would be cheating.

A popular pediatrician gives us this version of the Basic Four: meat, dairy, vegetables, fruits. That sounded wrong to me: I could have sworn that all produce was lumped into one category, which might be why the green beans in the ground beef casserole were all the fruits and veggies we supposedly needed in a given day (thank goodness my mother was a fruit fanatic—and relatively enlightened—or I would have gotten scurvy by the time I was six).

Still Googling on the first page (because I'm far too lazy to go any deeper than that, thank you very much) I find this site, by one Aunt Lynnie—who's clearly just a citizen nutritionist, without the good Doctor's resources. She seems to have it right: meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables, cereals and grain. Her graphic shows what I vaguely recalled, that the meat group encompassed one other protein source. But it was eggs—meat and eggs. Dairy is its own category in the old scheme. That also made sense in those days, as there was tremendous concern about getting enough calcium into children. And I'm old-fashioned enough to think my child (when he/she arrives) should get a little cow's milk every day, despite Dr. Gordon the Food Prude's warnings about its dangers, and his assurance that tofu and broccoli contain ample calcium.

And I'm suddenly seized by nostalgia: I want to eat something "healthy" from the old days. Like macaroni and cheese. Or, you know—beef.

Posted by: Attila at 01:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 554 words, total size 4 kb.