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The first time I laid eyes on the new U.S. food pyramid, I immediately wanted a steak. I had registered almost nothing about the refreshed guidelines—not the upside-down orientation, balanced precariously on a bowl of whole grains, or the embrace of dairy and fats—except for a cartoony T-bone in the upper left corner, crimson red, trim still intact. A few hours later, somewhere along Interstate 80 heading from my home in California toward Lake Tahoe, I pulled over at a roadside steakhouse to satisfy that emoji-induced craving but was left chewing on a fibrous, forgettable cut, struck by how effectively the image had dictated the meal. I couldn’t help but wonder: How can a single graphic stand in for the platonic ideal of an American plate in a country shaped by myriad cultures and ways of eating?
The model’s folksy simplicity trades on nostalgia, casting its recommendations as common sense. “The design does more than instruct; it persuades, or attempts to,” says Deborah Millman, a designer and professor at the New York School of Visual Arts. The size of the steak icon was reportedly debated down to the wire by the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (under secretaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brooke Rollins, respectively), a reminder of how carefully its influence has been calibrated. Released in January alongside the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), the capsized pyramid gives top billing to “Protein, Dairy, and Healthy Fats” (T-bone to turkey, whole milk to nuts) and “Vegetables and Fruits” (broccoli to berries). Then it tapers down to grains like wheat bread and oatmeal, with American supermarket staples such as olive oil, yogurt, potatoes, and peanuts strewn in between—not randomly, but not rigidly, either. With no sign of tofu, coconut, fish sauce, lentils, plantains, seaweed, tamarind, teff, cactus, goat, or hundreds of other global foods consumed daily across this country, the diagram appears to overlook the gastronomic complexities of such a diasporic demographic.The inverse pyramid is the latest in a long line of federal nutrition models—from the wheel-shaped Basic Seven (1946) to the original Food Guide Pyramid (1992) to MyPlate (2011)—that attempt to standardize the American diet even as the country has grown more diverse, with the latest Census counting more than 1,500 ethnic groups. “Dietary advice has always expressed social ideals,” says Charlotte Biltekoff, an associate professor of food science and technology at the University of California, Davis. In her book Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, she examines 100 years of government guidance and regards the flipping of the pyramid as “more symbolic than substantive…a performative gesture rather than a meaningful shift.”
In times like these, gestures often stand in for change: a visible break from the past that leaves the same underlying system in place—in this case, the same protein-heavy meal, but without the helpful portion percentages that MyPlate spelled out. In practice, Biltekoff notes, people eat according to convenience, responsibility, and identity. Day to day, those factors outpace any government-imposed standard to “eat real food,” a refrain echoing through the current 2025–2030 guidelines, but one that actually harkens back to the early 20th century, when Progressive Era reformers called for “wholesome” and “natural” foods.
The irony of my mediocre-steak detour is that I already had a better version of a protein-rich meal waiting for me at the end of the drive. There were chicken thighs in the fridge, ready to be braised in soy sauce with coconut vinegar and peppercorns—adobo, a staple across the Filipino diaspora, which includes roughly 4.5 million Americans. The night before, a friend, also Pinay, had picked up barbecue-pork skewers basted in a mix of Sprite and Toyo and a whole grilled tilapia from the hot counter at our neighborhood Asian grocery. We shared it at a picnic, lips sticky from the pork’s glaze, dipping the fish in patis (fish sauce) sharpened with calamansi, raw onion, and fresh bird’s-eye chile, with steamed white rice—our gastronomic north star—always within reach.
This kind of meal doesn’t map neatly onto a government diagram. “For Asian American communities, whose everyday eating patterns look quite different from the Western model—rice as a staple, communal-style meals, fermented foods, plant-forward dishes that predate any wellness trend—that gap between the visual and the lived reality can feel significant,” says Karen Lau, a nutritionist and registered dietitian based in Boston. In related research on East Asian diets, she and her colleagues found that diets higher in carbohydrates and fiber and lower in animal protein can improve blood sugar regulation, suggesting that for an estimated 9 million to 11 million East Asian Americans, the U.S. guidance doesn’t readily apply. In some cases, that’s led to “heritage pyramids”—versions of the model that swap in familiar staples and dishes so the picture looks more like what’s already on the table. In one model from Oldways, a food and nutrition nonprofit, red meat makes up the narrow tip and whole grains, fruits, and vegetables form the base—with a pillar below acknowledging the importance of activity and social connection.
Elsewhere in the world, government nutrition models are more, ahem, digestible where eating patterns are culturally cohesive. In Japan, the official guide is rendered not as an upside-down pyramid but something else similarly V-shaped—a spinning top, reflecting the balance between daily physical activity and nutrition. According to Nobuo Yoshiike, a Japanese nutrition researcher, it’s dish-based rather than ingredient-based “to advance acceptability and usability.” Rather than asking eaters to assemble an ideal plate, the spinning top assumes a meal already has form: grain dishes (a bowl of rice or a serving of udon) occupy the widest tier, followed by vegetable dishes (a burdock salad called kinpira gobo, or goma-ae, steamed sesame spinach; miso soup also counts), and then something like small grilled fish or a few slices of tonkatsu. Protein is present, but it’s not the organizing force.
By contrast, the current U.S. guidelines increase the recommended daily protein intake by a whopping 91%, making it not only the gravitational pull of the plate but also a hit to the wallet: A Numerator analysis found that full alignment with the guidelines would raise grocery bills by about 32% per person. This assumes, of course, that Americans have consistent access to whole, fresh foods—something that the 14% of U.S. households currently experiencing food insecurity do not. Budget options—a can of green beans, a bag of frozen peas, a tin of tuna—take up minimal space on the diagram, leaving the rest to premium foods, what Biltekoff calls a push toward “reclaiming purity of the body.” “In the American nutritional view, animal protein is associated with virility,” she adds, “an idea that isn’t necessarily borne out in nutritional science but is very much in line with core cultural values.”The environmental consequences of such a recommendation are significant, especially since livestock agriculture already accounts for roughly 4% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Still, some members of the Dietary Guidelines Scientific Advisory Committee—a federally appointed panel that reviews nutrition studies and produces a report that informs the guidelines—have had ties to the beef and dairy industries, raising some eyebrows. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sized up the stakes bluntly: “Is [the guideline] actually based in gold-standard scientific evidence, or is this essentially food-industry propaganda that is kind of coming from the federal government?”
Indigenous chef Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe who was raised on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, starts from a different premise. Cattle weren’t introduced to North America by European colonists until 1521, and he has spent the past decade working toward a precolonial diet, most notably through his nonprofit Native American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). He shapes the menu for his James Beard Award–winning Minneapolis restaurant, recently renamed Indígena by Owamni, around a decolonized pantry of foods that Indigenous peoples have sourced for countless generations—dishes like smoked bison rib eye, huckleberry-cured salmon, and wild rice porridge with tart chokecherries.
“There’s a lot of food knowledge in our culture that should be the building blocks of how we think about nutrition,” says Sherman, who hardly sees Native foodways represented in the current nutrition guidelines, despite the nearly 10 million people who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native. Sherman’s new book, Turtle Island, is his latest effort to document Indigenous food systems and wisdom from across North America, highlighting the pre-GMO maize cultures of the Southwest and Midwest, where corn functioned as a primary carbohydrate, and the fat-rich diets of coastal Alaska, where seal oil, whale fat, and fish provide dense, cold-climate energy. If the government’s directive is to “eat real food,” Indigenous foodways offer millennia of practical knowledge and stand as just one of many eating traditions the guidelines overlook. “We’re not the same humans,” Sherman says, naming the one universal truth that could actually turn the food pyramid on its head.
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