Why Are So Many People Bad At Eating?

 "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop?" This may have been the first serving suggestion I can recall. The answer, according to Mister Owl was three. He came by this knowledge experimentally, of course. By biting a Tootsie Pop. With his teeth. Owls don't have teeth. I looked it up. They swallow their prey whole and let their gizzards do the work. Then they yak up the bones and fur. Or rolled paper sticks, in the case of the aforementioned Tootsie Pop. What I did not know then was that I shouldn't trust owls when it comes to how I should be eating.

Then there was the ever-present "good breakfast," pitched by every sugary advertised on Saturday morning cereal. Toast, juice, and Trix. What they didn't fully explain is that you would need a couple of loaves of toast and a few gallons of juice to help serve as a countereffect to the poison in that bowl. For a while, I took up Raisin Bran, feeling that the health benefits would be obvious almost immediately. Except for the two heaping teaspoons of sugar that I felt compelled to add to help the fiber go down. 

At school, I was confronted by the Food Pyramid. I was instructed that It was vital for me to try and eat a balanced diet, sampling from each of the six sections each day, with that cap stone of fats, oils and sweets sitting up there, tantalizing, taunting. Forbidden. 

I'm  not going to let geometry define me or the food that I eat. I'm going to eat what 's good for me, mostly what's good to me. And I have a distinct memory of King Ding Dong of Hostess snack cake fame reminding me to eat correctly while flouting the importance of eating right. Or maybe that was a fever dream from a youth spent getting buzzed on sugar in all its tasty forms. 

And somewhere along the line, I grew up. And I started reading food labels, mostly to my wife's insistence. That's when I noticed that "serving suggestion" thing. I discovered that just because you opened a package, it wasn't necessary to consume all its contents. There was a lot of math involved. A lot of metric conversions, too. I found out that the pyramid is now a thing of the past, and the powers that be would now like for us to think of our daily intake in terms of healthy plates. Color coded for easy disambiguation. Which is fine, since it turns out that the death wish I may have harbored in my twenties has abated somewhat, and I will make a salad from time to time.

But in what universe ever was somebody under the horribly mistaken impression that those were "two-bite brownies?" 

Come on. If you're an owl. Maybe.