Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I came across MyPyramid.gov — the new, improved "food pyramid" brought to us by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You know the pyramid, which replaced the heavily-lobbied "Basic 4" a few years ago. Well now they have changed things again, making it slightly more personalized, but also making it much more confusing in the process.

Whoever came up with the new pyramid was clearly not a student of Edward Tufte. I'm no expert at informational graphics, but this has so many flaws to my eye.

First, the shape. If you are trying to convey proportions, a "pie chart" is probably a better way to go; then again, the USDA probably doesn't want to give people the idea that they should be eating more pie! The retention of the triangle ("pyramid") shape was probably done to ease the transition or keep people from criticizing them from changing things again, but doing so is counterproductive in this case. I find my eyes moving from the base of the triangle, where at least you can get a sense of relative thickness of the wedges up toward the top, where the lines converge to the same width. This is a step backwards to the days of Basic 4, where all food groups seemed to be of equal importance.

My other complaint is the white lines between the colors. That's distracting; what's worse is that the slightly thicker yellow line is actually fats & oils. What was clearly there yet small on the old pyramid is now just an artifact.

I'd be very curious to see what Tufte would say about the best way to present this information. The USDA needs to go at it again!