Pyramid Options

The Sans Fromage sent me an article that Slate ran challenging the USDA's new Food Guide Pyramid. Slate's author, et al., were appalled that "after spending four years and $4.2 million, the USDA has screwed up a relatively simple concept.":

"If the USDA's recommended diet helps people live long and prosper, it won't be thanks to the design of the agency's new food pyramid. The flaws are myriad. There are no icons or labels to indicate which food group is represented by each band of the pyramid's vertical rainbow of stripes. The color choices are less than intuitive. The varying widths of the stripes represent the relative amounts of each food group you should eat, but you can't grasp that information in a glance. And the yellow stripe representing fats is so narrow it almost disappears. The old pyramid wasn't without flaws, but at least it clearly showed a diet hierarchy."

The article includes a slide show of schemes their four design teams came up with after just a few days of deliberation. I liked this one (but they all recommend too much milk!):