As has been noted here before, I don’t eat today what we ate every day on the dairy farm of my youth. Back then, we worked like plow horses, so we ate like plow horses: five times daily with a noon dinner as the big table-bender.
How we ate all that food — hefty pork and beef roasts, buckets of potatoes, pounds of butter, vegetables both fresh and canned, raw milk, home-rendered lard, a variety of sausages, baked goods and sugary desserts — and then pitched hay bales for six or seven steamy hours is well beyond my former waistline and current understanding.
Equally mysterious, however, is what I should eat now, given the new food guidelines issued recently by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
And I’m not alone.
Here’s how the New York Times reported the new guidelines when introduced: “In a striking reversal of past nutrition guidance, the Trump Administration released new dietary guidelines… that flip the food pyramid on its head, putting steak, cheese and whole milk near the top.”
Full disclosure: Steak, cheese and whole milk have always remained near the top of my food pyramid — the one from southern Illinois or, as locals call it, Little Egypt, and not the one from USDA.
The biggest difference between those creamy, dreamy meals of yore and today is that the word “daily” has been replaced with phrases like “not as often,” “smaller portions” and “no, that’s sinful.”
Which, now that I think about it, seems clearer than the hash HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. served up when explaining the changes from the previous “MyPlate” guidelines to today’s “MyPyramid” confusion.
For example, Kennedy, a long-time critic of Americans’ eating habits, recommended Americans “cook with butter and beef tallow despite the fact that scientific evidence does not support doing so,” noted the Times.
The lack of scientific evidence supporting any theory or policy, however, is not a problem for this White House where doing something is often more important than doing the right thing. See tariffs, the gutting of USAID, ending green energy credits, cutting SNAP benefits, slashing rural Medicaid funding …
Still, the new upside-down pyramid contained enough evidence-based advice — ”eat plenty of fruits and vegetables,” “prioritize protein and avoid the sugary, processed food” — that, in the end, advocacy groups such as the American Medical Association endorsed it.
Many of the changes were red meat to both farmers and ranchers. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association “welcomed” the recommendations, and the National Pork Producers Council “appreciated” the guidelines that put “pork front and center on the plates.”
It wasn’t a coincidence, reported the Times. The new pyramid, it explained, was heavily influenced by “a new set of handpicked experts who worked in secret over the last few months.”
Secret, because, “(F)ive the 10 current scientific experts disclosed recent financial relationships with the beef, dairy or pork industries…”
There’s an even bigger problem than the evident nutritional and business conflicts-in-interest, wrote Matt Prescott, the author of “Food Is The Solution: What to Eat to Save the World,” in the Times Jan. 10.
According to Prescott, “If Americans increased their protein intake by just 25 percent in response to the administration’s new recommendations… (it) would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year — an area larger than Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania combined.”
Where will this land come from? The likeliest source of land is U.S. corn, soy, wheat and cotton acres. If so, what happens to their ancillary industries like ethanol and biodiesel?
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, recommended reading, and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
