THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE is now taking suggestions for its new, improved Food Pyramid, to be unveiled in 2005. This is the federal government’s pictograph of an ideal diet. The one now in use dates to 1992. Maybe you’ve seen it: The base shows six servings of the “Breads & Cereals Group.” Moving up, you come to a row with three to five servings of vegetables and two to four servings of fruit. On top of that are two servings from the milk group and two servings from the meat group. At the apex are the fats, oils, and sweets, with the recommendation to “use sparingly.” Obviously things haven’t worked out as the pyramid designers had hoped. Readers of this page I’m sure are clustered on the svelte end of the waistline spectrum. But–how to put this nicely?–in my travels across America this summer, I saw an awful lot of plus-sizes out there. The phrase that kept running through my head was “gross national product”–and I’m not an economist.
There are controversies about the pyramid, by the way, which have split the nutritional-advice community. Some people think the whole thing is a devious plot by the USDA to promote increased consumption of American agricultural products, in the guise of health advice. Others think it is pseudoscientific and has encouraged a whopping over-indulgence in “healthy” but high-calorie carbohydrates. Still others think it has led Americans to obsess about their food, when what they really need to do is exercise more.
My own investigations lead me to believe that a simple misunderstanding has subverted the good intentions of the pyramid builders.
Strictly for research purposes, I returned this August, as I try to do every year, to my favorite human feedlot–a restaurant called the Sirloin Stockade in Columbus, Indiana. Unless you live in the NAFTA Belt (from Mexico, north through Texas, to Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and Indiana), you probably haven’t enjoyed this “fabulous steakhouse and buffet concept,” as the parent corporation describes its chain of properties. For somewhat less than $10 a head, you receive unlimited access to a high-end cafeteria (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). Think fried chicken, shrimp, roast beef, steam table vegetables, fresh breads, every kind of potato, pizza, salad bar, cake, pie, ice cream sundaes–that sort of menu. Plus steak.
Until this year the steak was extra. But then the Golden Corral opened across town with its own Great Steak Buffet, featuring, yes, “all-you-can-eat sirloin steak.” Now there’s something of a sirloin shootout in town, and as a result the steaks have been added to the Stockade’s prix-fixe menu.
In an investigative spirit, I looked around to gauge what might be the median consumption in the crowded dining room, and tried my best to fit in. I weighed my tray down with several of the fabulous buffet concepts, starting with the sirloin and fried chicken, a couple of the yeast rolls, green beans, corn, broccoli, mashed potatoes, gravy, a little dressing, and some peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. This looked about par for the first pass. Then I went back for another serving of peach cobbler a la mode, and a couple of the glazed cinnamon buns, which are put out fresh from the oven in trays of 24 and get gobbled up just as fast.
Unless I’m mistaken, that’s pretty much the entire pyramid right there–the carbs, the vegetables, the fruit, dairy, and meat. And as prescribed, I used the fats, oils, and sweets sparingly. Only one pat of butter per roll. Quite a few of the patrons looked as if they had downed more than one pyramid.
Of course, the pyramid is meant to represent “suggested daily servings.” But who slows down to read the fine print? We’re an achievement-oriented people–show us a pyramid, and we want to build it. And since we want to do a proper job of it, we try to shore up each level as we go, with extra servings.
My suggestion to the USDA: Scrap the pyramid. The trouble with advice, even well-intended, is that people don’t really need it. And they’re less likely to use it as a guideline than they are to use it as an alibi. (“What do you mean I shouldn’t have had that box of Lucky Charms for a midnight snack? I’m just getting my daily requirement of the cereals group.”)
The plus-sizing of America may not be pretty, but it’s the visible evidence of a couple of astonishing historical achievements: An ordinary man can now afford to eat like a king on a daily basis. And almost nobody does hard physical labor anymore. We no longer work in corrals and stockades, but we like to eat as if we still did.
–Richard Starr
