Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

McPyramid

In today's WSJ ($), food writer Raymond Sokolov takes on the new food pyramid:

You and I just spent $2.5 million to turn a pyramid on its side, paint it with a rainbow coalition of colors and build a stairway along its side for a stick figure to climb. The Department of Agriculture outsourced this cartoon revision of the old and incomprehensible 1992 food pyramid to Porter Novelli, the international marketing firm. They call it MyPyramid. I can't help thinking it will soon be renamed McPyramid.

... McPyramid is just the kind of bureaucratic intrusion into our lives that a conservative administration should be lopping out of agency budgets with a meat axe. If we are too weak or dumb to eat the way we know we should, having to pay for a redundant and fudged federal reminder is an unfair tax on bloat recidivists and thin folk alike.

Especially since, on the very day after Ag Secretary Mike Johanns announced MyPyramid, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a joint study from the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that thin people died at a higher rate than the overweight.

To paraphrase the old saw, a libertarian is a food critic who just got nagged by the nanny state.

Update: Ann Althouse isn't happy about McPyramid either:

Could you please stop wasting my little tax contribution telling me what to eat, especially coming up with ideas like having a tomb as a symbol of health?

Ditto.