From Pyramid to Plate
The food pyramid, which the USDA first rolled out in 1992 is gone. It looked like this when I was a kid:
It’s been replaced with “My Plate,” which looks like this:
I can see that this is an improvement. I mean, just from a design standpoint, the new plate seems much easier to get on a glance, especially for kids. And we do eat most of our meals on round plates … so it kind of seems like a no-brainer.
And now that I look at the old pyramid, two things catch my eye – fats are on top. I know it’s because they’re what you’re supposed to eat the least amount of, but still. Maybe they should’ve gone with the inverted pyramid style. Because 8-year-old me looks at that and goes “I can eat dessert first!”
The giant block at the bottom is the second thing that catches my eye. Bread and noodles. The two foods that practically every kid on the planet will eat, usually before eating anything else. But there’s no mention of whole grains here. So we could be talking about white bread, white noodles and saltines. Six to 11 times per day!
One of the main purposes for any kind of food plate or pyramid is to serve as a visual learning tool for kids. But kids aren’t choosing their own meals. A teacher can hang a poster of the idealized food plate on the wall and talk about it with her students daily, but if they shuffle off to a cafeteria meal of processed chicken nuggets and fries each day, then go home to frozen pizzas … the message isn’t getting reinforced. It’s just getting lost.
So is it really worth the time and money that has been dumped into the project? I suppose only time will tell. The time under the food pyramid saw childhood obesity (and obesity in general) grow exponentially in America. Is it asking too much of a cute cartoon plate to try and solve the problem? Maybe we’d have more luck if we relied on rapping puppets to teach America how to eat.