Pyramids and Good Nutrition: Food and Information

Many of us love to eat information as much as we love to eat food. But are we eating the right kinds of information?

Eating Nutritious Food on the Road to Good Health

Remember the "food pyramid"? It was a visual depiction of a nutritious diet, based on food groups like meat, poultry, vegetables, fruit, etc. 

Imagine picking up a worn copy of a book at your local library's annual book sale, a book that purports to tell you how you should change your diet, based on the food pyramid, so you can live a healthier, more productive life. The book is only 180 pages long, so it should be an easy-enough read. But when you get home and thumb through this book, you realize the 180 pages include 30 pages of endnotes, index, and scripture references. That means the author must get his or her point across in 150 pages. Undeterred, you begin reading, only to discover the first fifty of the 150 pages of text explain what you already know: you need to choose what you eat more wisely if you're going to be healthy. The next ninety pages explain the food groups in the food pyramid. And the remaining ten pages tell you what results you will see from following a better diet.

This is what The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken is like.

Eating Nutritious Information on the Road to Wisdom

"Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World" is an enticing subtitle for McCracken's book. Our souls all need special care when we get so much information from the world that is true, partly true, or false. (The need for a term like "post-truth" disturbs me on several levels.) The author sets up a pyramid like the food pyramid to illustrate the importance of each "information group" to reaching actual God's-honest wisdom. I like the basic premise. I like the analogy between the food pyramid and the author's Wisdom Pyramid. 

But ... do I really need to slog through fifty pages of The Wisdom Pyramid to see why a more nutritious information diet will make me wiser? And why put off describing what a healthy wisdom lifestyle looks like till the end of the book? 

I believe it would've been much better to begin with a picture of a nutritious wisdom lifestyle. If I follow certain principles, what will that lifestyle look like, and why should I desire it? After that, I would succinctly explain the challenges we face every day in managing our information consumption, as well as the steps necessary to achieve a better diet. This last part is the meat of the book, and more words should be used there than in any other part of the book.

There are important messages in this book. But the way the problems and the solutions were presented didn't work for me.

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Food pyramid graphic from http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/Fpyr/pyramid.gif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=680809