Nostalgia and nutrition: The dark forces behind the '90s food pyramid

I loved the ’90s: I loved the pogs, the Beanie Babies, and the Spice Girls. The music, the shows (“Beavis and Butthead,” “VH1: Behind the Music,” etc.) and even the food was legendary. Who remembers those floaty things in Orbitz (long before the boba craze hit the U.S.), Crystal Pepsi, or doing some spring cleaning of your colon with Wow! chips?

But not everything from that time was “da bomb.” If you recall, you had to buy minutes for your phone, smoking sections still existed in most places, everything had to be saved on floppy disks, and oh—this was the era of the food pyramid. That colorful ’90s icon came out in 1992 and managed to make our already burgeoning obesity epidemic even worse.

Yet what was a brazen attack on our health for profit has become a quaint microcosm of what was to come in later decades. What should have been a harmless visual aid reveals a story of manipulation and vested interests by the food industry that is ongoing to this day.