The Information Diet

Chapter 10. How to Consume

“While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority.”

—Michael Pollen

So now we’ve got our three skills: data literacy, a sense of humor, and a method for training and accounting for our executive function and attention span. The question now is: what is it that we should consume? What kinds of information go into a healthy information diet?

The world of food is littered with advice, and the one we probably know the best comes from the United States Department of Agriculture: the food pyramid. You’ve seen it—it looks like Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1. The United States Food Pyramid: 1992–2011.

In 2011, the food pyramid was found to be too complicated, so it was distilled into something a bit more simple, ChooseMyPlate.gov, shown in Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2. The New ChooseMyPlate.gov: 2011–.

There is currently no government ...