A couple of days ago, I came across a cartoon of two cows looking up at a billboard plastered with RFK’s new food pyramid with a BIG You Are Here arrow pointing to a slab of beef in the top left corner. One cow says to the other, “This doesn’t look good.”
Which might lose something in the translation, but it got me laughing. And if life gives me a laugh, it has blog-worthiness written all over it. So here we are. RFK’s new food pyramid. Have you had a chance to look at it?
I scrolled right by it the first time it showed up on my screen. I subscribe to a news feed service, and as a non-paying subscriber, I get a ton of ads, which are a huge distraction, especially when they pop up in the middle of the article I’m reading. I’ve had to learn to scroll past them, which is what I did with the pyramid, thinking it was another one of those yoga chair fitness ads I am constantly being pestered by. I had to double back.
Those cows in the cartoon aren’t the only ones who’re upset at America’s new food pyramid. Over the decades they’ve had a few iterations of this pyramid — didn’t they even change it to a circle one time? — but it’s back to being a pyramid, a very colorful one at that, and turned on its head.
This begs the question. If the government decides to alter the food pyramid every time it comes up with a new, improved recommended diet for us, don’t you think it should apologize for getting it wrong all those other times? I never heard anyone from the government apologize for insisting that bread and cereal and muffins should be the foundation of a healthy diet for all those years. Not even a little sorry.
And if they were so wrong those other times, what makes them think they’ve got it right this time? Fool me once, fool me twice, but fool me three times? It’s time to rethink this.
A sidebar here: Over the years, when they changed the food pyramid and or circle, they gave less space on it to the bread/cereal portion. Remember that? But have you noticed over those same years that the bread and cereal aisles have more cereal, more bread, more cookies, more crackers now than they ever did?
RFK can tell us until he’s blue in the face that we need to be eating more of this and less of that but I don’t think Trix are for kids are going away anytime soon. Not based on the grocery store shelves I’m seeing.
What’s the government doing telling us what to eat anyway? My suggestion is for the government to get out of the business of telling me what I should eat. I can make up my own mind.
This week, a throwback to the sixties, Peter Sarstedt …