Mock pyramid has a political point

Click your way to www.mypyramid.gov and you’ll get all kinds of earnest eating tips from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s stripy new food guide pyramid.

Click to a slightly different website and you’ll stumble onto a spoof -- strikingly like the real thing but with text and a message that are anything but complimentary to the USDA.

Both sites carry the green USDA logo, the rainbow-like new pyramid being climbed by a stick figure plus an interactive tool that lets you tailor your pyramid based on gender, age and how much you exercise.

But read closer.

The real pyramid is bannered “United States Department of Agriculture.” The spoof pyramid -- at www.mypyramid.org -- carries the heading “United States Department of Agribusiness.”

The website is a political statement, said Stephen Eisenmenger, a Minneapolis-based website developer, who created the spoof with co-worker Molly Nutting.

“The USDA is there to promote agribusiness interests,” Eisenmenger said. “We felt what we could do with this site is represent the USDA more accurately than they represent themselves.”

Eisenmenger said that he and Nutting purchased the mypyramid.org domain name after the real pyramid was released two weeks ago.

The real pyramid is filled with advice such as making half one’s grains whole grains and choosing fruits without added sweeteners.

The doppelganger site offers different tips, such as: “make half your grains refined,” “high fructose corn syrup counts as one of your daily servings of grains,” and “base your selection of food products on the packaging pictures you find most attractive” and “some fruits can be rather tart or tangy, so a smart way to make these more appealing to children is to select products with added sweeteners.”

Mypyramid.org also contains links to articles challenging the USDA’s impartiality on matters of nutrition citing connections to the food and agriculture industry. The site digs slyly at the couch potato state of Americans, asking users to input the number of minutes a day they spend on “moderate or vigorous activity (such as playing video games, standing up to change the channel or walking to your car).”

The most vigorous category one can choose: “more than 11 minutes.”

Since the content went up, news of it has been buzzing around the Internet.

“I can’t even tell you how many people sent it to me,” said Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, whose book “Food Politics” (University of California Press, 2003) inspired the project, according to Eisenmenger.

“It’s pretty hilarious -- it deserves the kind of amused attention it’s getting,” Nestle added.

The parody is very clever, said Susan Bowerman, assistant director of UCLA’s Center for Human Nutrition. It follows in a tradition of earlier spoof pyramids, she said -- such as a disgracefully lopsided one that depicted what Americans actually eat as opposed to what they should, and another way-off-balance image that sized each pyramid block according to the amount of advertising dollars spent on that category of food.

But Bowerman worries that some people might not realize that Eisenmenger and Nutting’s site is political parody.

“The average person reading this -- it won’t mean anything to them,” Bowerman said. “Someone could stumble on this and say, ‘Oh, corn syrup is a grain -- that sounds good, because I can’t eat all those whole grains they want me to eat.’ ”

USDA spokesman John Webster, of the department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, said the real pyramid website had received in excess of 200 million hits and more than 1,000 letters and e-mails, most of them complimentary. The agency, he added, had no comment on the spoof site.