USDA spoof offers food for thought
The images are familiar to millions of people who have clicked on the USDA's new food pyramid website since it launched last week: the rainbow-colored pyramid, the jaunty little stair-climbing figure, and the box that asks for age, gender, and estimate of daily physical exercise.
If the question about exercise offers such examples as ''playing video games, standing up to change the channel, or walking to your car," then you must have typed in ''mypyramid.org" instead of ''.gov," because you aren't on the US Department of Agriculture's website after all. You're reading a spoof by a Minneapolis couple who, in an act of political expression combined with quick Web programming, snagged two variations on the domain name, copied the design, and wrote a parody skewering government priorities.
The official site, for example, recommends varying your vegetables to include dark green, orange, starchy, and more. The spoof suggests: ''Individually packaged vegetable items from exotic places around the globe are cleaner, more convenient, and keep our friends in the petroleum and petrochemical industries chugging along."
For those having technical difficulties, something the official site experienced when massive traffic bogged down servers, its ''Site Help" link advises: ''Please refer to our technology requirements to ensure your system meets the minimum requirements." The parody says: ''If you are having technical difficulties, it's probably because you do not have new and/or expensive enough equipment. If that's the case, then you are probably not in our target demographic and lack the financial means to have a significant impact on the Agribusiness economy anyways."
The government's site has gotten more than 268 million hits, and the parody has gotten more than 1 million.
The satirical site originated when Stephen Eisenmenger and Molly Nutting read an online account of the unveiling of the new pyramid April 19 and wondered: Did the government buy up all the potential extensions of ''mypyramid"? Eisenmenger checked, and indeed the USDA had secured .gov and .com but left .org and .us untouched. So the couple paid $15.36 for the rights to both for a full year.
They didn't set up the site until the next morning, ''when we checked the stats and had gotten 100,000 hits" from people who had typed in one of those addresses by accident. ''So we thought, we've got to do something with this."
It took almost $2.5 million and four years for the government and the PRmegafirm it hired, Porter Novelli, to develop the MyPyramid system, including the website. It took Eisenmenger and Nutting, who run a Web development company, the better part of a day to copy it.
''Cut and paste, baby," Eisenmenger said. ''Cut and paste. It's an awesome technology. Luckily for citizens of America, the USDA's graphics become part of the public domain."
The parody uses humor, but Eisenmenger and Nutting have serious things to say about the real pyramid, which some critics have dubbed ''McPyramid" because Porter Novelli's past clients include
''Our aim is to represent the USDA more truthfully than they represent themselves," Nutting said. ''We're trying to be funny about it, but these are serious issues -- the kind of food the government is telling us we should eat. We're really concerned about where our food is coming from, and they're making these recommendations in the interest of industry instead of the health of Americans."
The USDA won't comment on the parody other than to acknowledge its existence. ''We've seen it, we're looking at it, and that's about it," said spokeswoman Angela Harless.
Eisenmenger, 40, and Nutting, 22, are mostly vegetarian, eating fish but no red meat or chicken. They think the government could issue more straightforward guidelines that would have a more positive impact on the health of Americans.
''They could say eat less food, or eat little to no red meat, because its consumption is linked to heart disease and cancer," Eisenmenger said. ''Eat less processed foods. Make all your grains whole."
One of the Web surfers who stumbled onto the satire was Deborah Vatcher, a physician who lives in Plainville. She had been to the government's pyramid when it first went up last week and was returning to check out ''My Pyramid Tracker," a function that lets users enter their food intake and compare it to the USDA recommendations. She started punching in her information on what she assumed was the official home page when she saw the reference to video games, and then to the Department of Agribusiness, ''and I knew somebody was having some fun."
She ending up reading the whole site. ''I totally thought what they did was enlightening and entertaining," she said. ''I probably got more out of their site than the official government site, to be honest."
So did the Physicians Committee for Responsible Nutrition, which advocates a plant-based diet and shares many of the viewpoints expressed on the parody site, which links to theirs. ''We just love it," said spokesman Howard White. ''We were just as surprised about it as anyone. It's a brilliant spoof with a very serious point behind it."
While Eisenmenger and Nutting grabbed two of the domain names, their parody may not be the last. According to Network Solutions, a California man has reserved the domain www.mypyramid.info, but as of yesterday, seven other extensions were still up for grabs.
Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.
