The Food Guide Tent

Everyone needs to learn how to eat healthily.  At a young age it is impressed upon us what food is ‘good’ and what food is ‘bad’.  Some synonyms for good include healthy, nutritious, and low-carb.  Bad usually means candy.  All this would be hard to remember, had (I assume) the FDA not given us this wonderful tool: the Food Guide Pyramid!

The Pyramid

My mother is a dietitian, and so I was more familiar with the pyramid than most as a child.  It hung on the wall in her office, along with various smiling foods and a diagram of a clotting artery.  It is a part of my childhood.  As you see, the foods are arranged into various groups, or ‘food groups’, and each occupies a different brick of the pyramid.  The larger the brick, the more of that food one must eat to retain a healthy balance.  Simple, even for children.  I especially liked the white triangles and orange circles, which represent sugar and fat respectively.

So, obviously, you need lots of grains (bread), a good amount of fruits and vegetables, and slightly less dairy (milk) and meat (steak).  The top of the pyramid, the small part filled with sugar and fat, is the part that we should eat sparingly.  That’s candy.

However, time passes, and nothing gold can stay.  The people in charge decided that the pyramid I grew up with was old hat, and created this: My Pyramid.

The Tent

There are similarities, yes.  All the basic groups are still there, and this time they are color coded.  But, as you can see, this is not a pyramid.  This is a tent.  Just because something is a triangle does not make it a pyramid.

Now, my mother (who, as a dietitian, gets the first word on updates in the world of food) tells me that the Pyramid was changed to help emphasize that the different groups are equally important.  The old Pyramid, apparently, was racist against milk.  My problem with this theory is that the different flaps of the Food Guide Tent are still different sizes which, I am fairly certain, indicates different levels of importance.  I think mom is with me on this one.  Also, the Fats, Oils, Sweets section of the pyramid has been cut down to merely Oils, and does not even receive a label.  A shame; the Fats and Sweets were my favorite parts.

The Tent is no longer solely about food, however.  The person running is not the result of someone going clip-art happy, but is in fact a food group.  It represents exercise.  Well, won’t he be surprised to get to the top of the pyramid and realize that there is no candy there anymore.

I see the merits of the Food Guide Tent.  It is colorful, and very post-modern in design.  But it cannot replace the Pyramid for me.

And nothing will replace that artery clotting diagram in my mind.  That thing is there to stay.

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