Upside-Down Eating and The New Food Pyramid
A Sentient Slim Jim Is Telling Us How to Eat
Welcome back to Stir the Pot. I hope you had a restful end of the year. I spent the last few weeks cooking and hanging out with the people I love. I’m grateful for the break because 2026 is already giving us too much bullshit. I had a whole other piece planned for this week, but I have to address the stupidity in the room. I can’t keep my mouth shut when I dumbass stuff. You might have missed the announcement because of the much larger, more horrific news coming out of Minnesota, but this week the US government reset the nutritional guidelines for Americans. On Wednesday, Health Secretary and sentient Slim Jim, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., unveiled a new, inverted food pyramid prioritizing red meat and full-fat dairy at the top. You don’t have to know much about nutrition to understand that’s some bad advice. Like all things created under this administration, this New Pyramid (the very real and creative name) is dumb as hell, scientifically dubious, and structurally unsound. It’s a hard time to be a person with a functioning brain.
The food pyramid most of us are familiar with was replaced in 2011 by MyPlate, a more common-sense set of food guidelines to help people make better choices at mealtime without having to think in ounces. As Americans, that’s not our strong suit. MyPlate was divided into four sections of approximately 30 percent grains, 40 percent vegetables, 10 percent fruits and 20 percent protein. Of course, these changes were made under the Obama administration and championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, so this administration is acting as though this never happened. In fact, the website explaining the New Pyramid shows a picture of the food pyramid from 1992 as though that was what they were replacing. It wasn’t. They are rewriting history once again.
The rhetoric around the New Pyramid and the tagline “Eat Real Food” might not sound all that bad at first. We should be eating nutrient dense foods, but like all propaganda, these talking points don’t match what they are actually recommending. For example, in the press conference on Wednesday, Secretary Kennedy proudly declared, “We are ending the war on saturated fats,” as part of his justification for placing red meat and whole fat dairy at the top of the new recommendations. Excessive saturated fats have been repeatedly shown for decades to increase the risk of heart disease, but Secretary Kennedy operates on vibes, not science. But why recommend something so clearly at odds with medical science? It’s worth noting that JBS, the largest meat producer in the world, was the biggest donor to Trump’s Inauguration last year. JBS has a long of history of bribing government officials in their home country of Brazil, and was just cleared by the SEC under this admiration for listing on the New York Stock Exchange. If JBS sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote about them and their new retail enterprise, Wild Fork, in 2024. Yeah, we stay ahead of the curve around here.
The Wildest Fork
I’m a grocery store fanatic. You would think that after working in them for almost a decade I would’ve had my fill, but no. Not even close. I’ve been known to whip a quick U-turn when I spot a new specialty market or random niche grocery I’ve never been to. I can’t help myself. So when I saw a new market named Wild Fork with bright,…
The New Pyramid website and graphics were designed by the newly created National Design Studio. If this is the first you are hearing of this department created by an executive order, me too. The whole thing is very reminiscent of the Publicity and Information Department and the juvenile, nonsensical nature of the graphics makes me think they used AI. Why is the beef raw but the turkey cooked? What’s with the scale of all this food? Is that white rice with plain kidney beans on it? Who eats that? The pyramid doesn’t even follow the guidelines, showing white bread and white rice while claiming these are whole grains. The food illiterate are telling you and your family how to eat. The whole website looks like a rip-off of Cards Against Humanity which seems pretty damn fitting. This is Nutrition Against Humanity.
Their own illiteracy shows itself again in the closing points of the fact sheet released alongside the announcement of the New Pyramid. In perhaps the only truthful bullet point presented on the announcement, the US Department of Health and Human Services proudly states, “We reject this logic: a common-sense, science-driven document is essential to begin a conversation about how our culture and food procurement programs must change to enable Americans to access affordable, healthy, real food.” Maybe they don’t know how bullet points and colons work, but I think that’s just a Freudian slip betraying their real position. Common sense and science are rejected in favor of propaganda and desires of wealthy corporations. Just look at the sentence that follows; “The Trump administration welcomes all stakeholders to be part of this conversation in the coming year.” Not citizens, not voters, but stakeholders. I hope that clears up exactly who this upside-down bullshit is in service of.
If you want to learn how to cook lots of affordable meals full of vegetables, you’ve come to the right place. Tomorrow, paid subscribers are getting the recipe for one of my most beloved dishes, Pasta e Ceci with a Tomato Coconut Gravy. Not a subscriber yet? You know what to do.
What do you think of these new guidelines? Did you check out their new website? Do you know how colons works? Let’s chat about it in the comments.
xoxo,
Michelle
Grocery Shopping Like Its 2016
It’s hard to talk about food—even though it’s my job—when so many people are struggling to access food in the US. SNAP recipients have still not received their benefits this month and hundreds of military commissaries are set to close next month. I will continue to give you the recipes, food, and goofy content you subscribed for while also keeping this …
Excellent catch on the JBS connection. The pyramid flipping is bad enough on its face, but tying it back to inauguration donors makes the whole stakeholder language crystal clear. I've been following how food policy gets written by industry for years and this feels like they just stopped pretending. The graphic design being that sloppy almost makes it worse becuase it shows how little effort went into the actual science part.
Everything with this administration I just can't. Living in an oligarchy sucks shit.