The New USDA Food Pyramid, Johnny Carson and i-Pods

When Carson died a few weeks ago, there was a spate of articles saying "There will never be another Johnny Carson." They were right, but for the wrong reason.

It's not that there'll never be another Johnny Carson — it's that there'll never be another Johnny Carson phenomenon.

Johnny Carson happened in an era when we had three networks and everyone watched one of them. He was a shared cultural experience — everyone knew him. His shows made water cooler conversation the next day.

We don't have shared cultural experiences any more — at least not like we did in Carson's heydey — because we don't have a shared culture. We have many, many fragmented mini-cultures. If you follow Lindsay Lohan's comings and goings, it's pretty unlikely that you've heard of Miles Davis. Show me someone who actually knows who Herbert Von Karajan is, and I promise you the name Hillary Duff will elicit a blank stare. If you're a fan of The DaVinci Code, I probably won't run into you at a Henry Rollins concert.

Even the term "water cooler conversation" is a quaint throwback to a time when people actually had to go to the office to work. The internet connects us in paradigm-shifting ways, and yet gives us the freedom to become completely insulated. We can conduct what used to be shared social experience — from work to fliriting — in our bathrobes at our computer screens at any hour of the day or night. Shared cultural experience is becoming an oxymoron.

Take music and television. CDs are a relic of the baby boomer generation — anyone born after 1975, downloads music, burns his own mixes, and turns them into completely individualized playlists. Three TV networks have morphed into 500 digital channels. And choice and individuation doesn't stop there. You used to have to watch Mary Tyler Moore on Monday nights at 9 if you wanted to know what everyone else would be talking about the next day. Now you can watch Desperate Housewives at 2 AM on Tuesday with the flick of the "select" button on your TiVo.

Which brings me to the new Food Pyramid.

Nutritionists and other interested parties will argue for the next decade about all the stuff the Food Pyramid guys got wrong, but they'll be missing the point, which is this: the food pyramid is no longer "The Food Pyramid." It's a dozen different pyramids. Sure the details are screwed up, but the salient fact is that we're finally beginning to recognize that the days of "one size fits all" are over. The era of the iPod, TiVo, and digital satellite have finally hit the diet world.

So the new Food Pyramid gives us twelve different options. In point of fact there are probably 293 million, one for each person in the country. But 12 is a start. It's the beginning of a recognition of something I've been saying for years: everybody's different; no formula works for everyone. Your metabolic footprint is unique-- the ideal nutritional plan for you is as individual as your fingerprints.

The other good thing about the new pyramid — and believe me, there's not a lot here to write home about — is that it recognizes that there's more to healthy living than food choices. We can argue for a long time — and I'm sure we will — about the meaning of those exercise recommendations, but the fact is, they're there.

And that's definitely a step in the right direction.