U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns admits few Americans follow the Food Guide Pyramid’s recommendations.

Yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture paid $1.6 million to Porter Novelli, an international marketing-based public relations firm, to develop a slogan, Web site and educational materials for the redesigned Food Guide Pyramid unveiled Tuesday.

Did anyone at the USDA stop to ask how it might encourage Americans to conform to the guidelines before it opened taxpayers’ checkbooks to pay for a splashy revamp?

And is the design meaningful or easy to understand?

The new pyramid, dubbed “MyPyramid,” features six different colored bands to signify the food groups. Recommended intake for each food group is directly proportional to the width of each band.

The pyramid still employs the ambiguous term ‘servings.’ What measuring cup in any household measures a serving?

The USDA says serving recommendations depend on an individual’s age, gender and daily activity level. The new pyramid’s Web site, www.mypyramid.gov, allows Americans to personalize USDA recommendations based on user input.

Wonderful. In order to recommend something as basic as nutrition, Americans now must have a computer or, at the very least, access to one.

Fast food and vending-machine cuisine are cheap and accessible. The USDA has succeeded in making the Food Guide Pyramid anything but.

Healthy eating requires a little bit of planning and commitment. The USDA has taken a task that is already somewhat daunting and made it even more so.

Let’s hope the USDA doesn’t take another 13 years to redesign the pyramid. But if it does, it should spend less money marketing it and put a little more thought into making it understandable.