Sometimes a Carrot is Just...a Carrot

The USDA plate has landed, and it looks oddly…familiar. A primary-colored circle divided into nearly equal quarters, it has clean, retro lines reminiscent of the 1950s Four Food Groups. The huge difference, of course, is that Fruits and Vegetables have moved up in the world—from one-quarter of the diet in the meat-centric ‘50s to a full one-half today. The plate is in fact almost aggressively, preternaturally basic in design: Look how easy this is! it proclaims. Eating right is child’s play!

 And in some ways, it is. But Americans have been making nutrition way too complicated for more than a century now. The first USDA recommendations for a healthy diet came out in the mid-1890s, on a wave of brand-spanking-new nutritional science. We’ve been in love with evidence-based eating ever since. And where has it gotten us? One has to wonder.


In the 1890s the calorie was a recently discovered tool, almost a curiosity, as were the components of food that even school-children know today: fats, protein, and carbohydrates. And these tools were already being used as a bludgeon, a source of shame and finger-wagging. “We consume relatively too much of the fuel ingredients of food, such as the fats of meat and butter…conversely we have relatively too little of the protein or flesh-forming substances, like the lean of meat and fish,” proclaimed a food chemist named Wilbur Olin Atwater in 1892, author of the first-ever USDA food guidelines. Atwater went on to complain of the “enormously large” quantities of nutrients Americans were gobbling down, and the “great injury to health” that was the result. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Atwater was in some ways the era’s Michelle Obama, minus the charm she projects even when talking about obesity. He was sincerely concerned about the health of Modern Americans, and convinced that the answer lay in treating the body like a machine; he toiled away in his metal-walled respiration chamber measuring fuel in and waste out, looking for the magic formula. We’ve been looking for it ever since, now on a fiercely molecular level: we know all about neuropeptides and hormones that affect hunger, rates of absorption of various nutrients, what makes lab rats eat, not eat, exercise, not exercise…but at the end of the day, we’re back at the table, staring down a plate of food.

“It’s hard to find time to sort through all this [dietary] information, but we do have time to take a look at our kids’ plates,” Michelle Obama said yesterday. And if it looks like that cute little drawing, with lots of fruits and vegetables, she said, “then we’re good, it’s as simple as that.”

And sometimes, it just is.