The Pyramid Scheme: Visual Metaphors and the USDA's Pyramid Food Guides

In 1991 the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the creation of the Eating Right Pyramid, an icon designed to illustrate the federal government’s recommendations for a healthy diet. Even before its release, the Pyramid was a source of controversy; nutritionists and public health officials criticized the project as an exercise in jurisdictional malfeasance, while beef and dairy farmers complained that the new diet deemphasized the nutritional benefits of their products. The greatest source of conflict, however, did not derive from the information the guide displayed, but from the way in which that information was presented. While criticism was hurled against both the specifics of the diet and the fact that the Agriculture Department was responsible for generating nutritional recommendations,1 the most contentious debate was borne of the perceived hierarchical implications of the design itself. Critics interpreted the Pyramid, the design selected because it best reflected the proportion of a healthy diet each food group represented, as a source of symbolic and value-laden meaning. To the agriculture lobbies, the Eating Right Pyramid inappropriately categorized foods as good and bad, while to doctors and nutritionists the Pyramid presented the least healthy foods in the most positive light. Consequently, the hierarchical implications of the pyramidal shape defined the public discourse, and the Eating Right Pyramid was reframed as a site of conflicting visual metaphors. This paper analyzes the public discourse around the perceived problems with the Pyramid’s design. While much research has addressed the efficacy of the USDA’s nutritional policies from a public health perspective, this paper considers the status of the food pyramid, by far the most recognizable American nutritional guide, as a cultural object that is subject to visual interpretation. To that end, it tracks the discussion of the design’s development through a discourse analysis of all articles about the Pyramid published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today—the three newspapers that provided nearly all national coverage of the design’s journey from the drawing board to the back of nearly all packaged food products in the United States. This analysis is situated in Lakoff and Johnson’s framework for understanding metaphors and focuses on three stages in the food guide’s development: the unveiling of the