The Double Food Pyramid

The newly formed Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition unveiled a new food pyramid last week, showing the environmental costs of the more familiar-looking food pyramid. No real surprise, then, that the inverted environmental food pyramid illustrates how the most environmentally-friendly foods also tend to be the healthiest.

Barilla, the research spin-off of the Italian food manufacturer, examined the Life Cycle Assessment of various foods and ranked their ecological footprint in an attempt to visualize a sustainable diet. The current design has the feel of a corporate slide show, but the concept—a graphic representation of food's environmental impact—is certainly worth exploring further, especially as the United States reconsiders the abysmal failure of its current design: MyPyramid.