The government is telling us what to eat again. That's right. They have revamped the food pyramid and are now giving us advice in the shape of a plate. They call it MyPlate. I don't know if they're trying to be all hip and make it sound like MySpace, but just the name alone irritates me, so you can only imagine how I'm going to feel about their new guidelines overall.
I'm going to be referencing a very informative article over at the Washington Post and from which I will share fascinating aspects of this insanity.For instance, the entire tone of the program is that everyone is an idiot and needs something that is almost an exact representation of the concept of eating in order to understand something that really isn't that freaking complicated! For example, let's take what a one Robb MacKie, who is the head of the American Bakers Association, had to say about it. "It’s brilliant in its simplicity...It’s something the average American can look at and get a visual feel for how they can fill up a plate at a meal.” No, it's something that an American with a below average IQ could maybe get a feel for. And brilliant in simplicity? Seriously, if you think about it and it's so freaking simple, why is everyone so fat? Do you really think that it is complicated guidelines that are making so many people look like the Michelin Man? I don't think that's it at all. If the "average American" need this simplistic sort of guidance for something as instinctual as eating, then we're going to be doomed much sooner than I had originally anticipated.
But that guy wasn't the only one with that sort of a tone. Here are some thoughts from a one
Robert Post at the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion: "It’s grabbing the consumers’ attention that we are after this time, not making it so complicated that perhaps it is a turnoff....There is something really inviting about this familiar setting for meal time.” So,because it looks like a plate, people can relate it to their plates? When it was in the form of a pyramid, people just got so confused because they didn't eat off of pyramids and, therefore, they had NO idea what to do? Is that the argument? God, people are dumb.
Now, I'll admit that the revamped food pyramid was a piece of crap. Behold!
Yeah, I don't know what that is supposed to be, nor who thought it was a good idea. It's like kind of a pie chart and kind of a bar chart and kind of a graph chart all rolled into one unintelligible piece of crap. What was wrong with the original pyramid? Behold!
See, I don't see why they had to change that to the crazy one. What about it is so confusing to people? What weren't they getting? What's that? Ohhhh. You think it isn't that people weren't understanding it as much as they weren't caring about it? Huh. Interesting theory. But, that can't be right because the government went through all of the trouble to make us MyPlate so that we could healthy. It can't be because we don't care! If we didn't care, then we'd be surrounded by gazillions of fast food joints and kids would be fat. That's what would happen if people didn't care. Geez. That seems obvious. Now, where was I? Oh, right! Stupidity.
Of course, I'm assuming that the USDA has given some sort of a guideline on what size plate to use for this insanity. Because if you think about it, a 12-inch plate filled up with all of the food that MyPlate recommends is going to be a heck of a lot of food. They still haven't defined a serving. Naturally, that brings up the question of how high one can pile their plate. They've got the two dimensional thing down. Now what about the three dimensional aspect. Are towers of meatloaf ok? And of course, God forbid if anyone mentions the connection between food intake, exercise and weight. Madness, I tell you. Sheer madness.
Oh, and speaking of madness, I'd like you to just take one more glance at the MyPlate illustration. Now I'd like you to know that the Robert Post that I quoted above "...has spent two years developing the plate and the website". That's right. Two years to come up with a circle. Two years to come up with that? You have GOT to be kidding me. What in the hell were they doing doing those two years? How many shapes did they reject before finally deciding on the miraculous plate shape (ie, the circle) divided into four fairly equal sections?! This is what my tax dollars paid for? Two years of this crap? How much was this, exactly? Two million dollars?! If I had known that they were looking for someone to do this for two million dollars and they had two years to do it, I would have gladly done the work for half that amount and it would have taken me an hour. But that's only if I was drunk. If I wasn't drunk, I would have been able to crank that puppy out in five minutes. You know why? Because it's a CIRCLE, that's why! God, we're doomed.
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