Envisioning Healthy Eating: Alternatives to the Food Pyramid

by Kim, March 24, 2009 at 9:55am

There was a chilling op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that really points out the inadequacy of our current definition of "healthy":

Clearly, there is something missing from how we are currently envisioning food. When I thought about the messaging kids get from the TV about food, I decided that they're getting mostly qualities that aren't in the food itself: no food is precisely "wild," "fun," or "crazy," the way many kids' products are marketed. It's the beginning of a lifelong confusion between what a person can be and what that individual can be told they can find in a product.

There is an emphasis on flavor rather than taste, which in my mind has to do with branding a commodity. Nothing else has the flavor of your favorite brand of nacho chips, which was created in a closely-guarded lab. That singular flavor is  contained within that package--something you buy one reliable bag at a time. Whereas I think of taste as having to do more with the interaction between an individual and a food. Your "taste" in every sense is something you develop over the years, and includes such things as the distastefully orange fingers those nachos leave you with.

The values at the top of the pyramid are the voiceover that gives the viewer a sense that the product has somehow been approved from "on high", either by some meta-mom or by goodness itself. While I think many people attach values to food--social, environmental, and spiritual values--the fact is that in commercials these values are based on a fiction. An extrapolation from focus groups and taste tests, as idealized as the "balanced breakfast" that your pop tart is part of.

Maybe our food pyramid needs to be informed by some of the values of Ayurvedic thinking. Frozen or canned foods, according to that tradition, have less "chetana" or embodied intelligence than fresh foods...which is maybe a different take on the personality characteristics our culture tends to place in foods. This school of thought also views foods as divided into the six tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent, and bitter. According to your personal makeup, you should eat more or less of these tastes. An Ayruvedic practitioner once told me to eat few tomatoes but a lot of squash. Most of all, she impressed me with the idea that food was alive, to a greater or lesser extent.  See this chart for the 6 tastes.

The point is, how would you map out healthy eating? Maybe a pyramid isn't the right shape. A circle? Interlocking circles?

Hap tips to:  Grist: La Vida Locavore