My plate? I’d rather eat cornflakes

Jason Offutt

The food guides I knew as a child are gone and nobody told me. I had to discover this from the back of a box of grocery store brand corn flakes.

Corn flakes themselves are strange.

Invented in the 1890s by the ultra-religious Kellogg brothers who ran a sanitarium/health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan, corn flakes were designed to rid their patients/clients (including Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford, Mary Todd Lincoln and J.C. Penney) of sexual desire. I must admit a nice heaping bowl of corn flakes in the morning really doesn’t get me going.

The Four Basic Food Groups I learned in a colorful USDA handout in third grade was a simple, easy to understand breakdown of foods the human body needs to stay healthy, like sausage. The groups were pounded into the head of every kid in school, so we knew Ding Dongs were bad, we just didn’t care.

In order to be healthy in the 1970s, we just had to eat foods from the following categories:

1)Fruits and vegetables

2)Dairy products

3)Grains

4)Meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, nuts

At the top of the handouts were bright, friendly pictures of fruits and vegetables (with smiley faces). The USDA included especially enticing vegetables on their promotional material like beets, green bell peppers and radishes. All third graders are just crazy for radishes.

Dairy products, of which we were supposed to consume three cups per day, included milk, cheese and butter (labeled “real butter” so as not to confuse it with margarine, otherwise known as plastic). No yogurt on this list. In the 1970s we considered yogurt European, which made it exotic and wrong.

Grains were confusing. Although grains like bread and cereal were familiar, the suggested wheat bread and any cereal that wasn’t covered in pure cane sugar were as alien to a kid as not staring at your dad’s watch during church. Mom would sometimes come home from the store with wheat bread. It tasted like punishment.

Then there were meats, the money group. Fried chicken, ham, lobster (what 10-year-old eats lobster?), and a nicely marbled steak with the words “eat the fat” stamped lovingly on the side. Nuts were also in this category, and were depicted, for some reason, as acorns, which no one but squirrels and hippies ate. And there were hippies back then, yes siree. They sang anti-war songs and ate acorns.

Now everything I knew about healthy food is gone. I might as well be German. The Four Basic Food groups have been replaced with a plate.

A plate.

Named My Plate, the guide is divided into four sections: fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein with a cup to the side for dairy. Gone are recommendations for butter and eating the beef fat (and liking it if you know what’s good for you). These foods have been replaced with oatmeal, processed soy products and skim milk. Not a strip of bacon in sight.

Where was I when the food world changed? Probably thinking about sex. I’d better eat some corn flakes.

Jason Offutt’s first novel, “A Funeral Story,” is available at amazon.com.