Remember being taught the food pyramid in elementary school? The food sections were dairy, grains, fruits, vegetables, meat and fat/sugar. Those were super simple groupings designed to teach little kids about healthy eating, but maybe they were a little too simple?

For a good part of my life, I have considered eggs to be meat. I never questioned my grouping of eggs because I rarely ate eggs or meat, and how you group your foods is not that common of a conversation.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of highschool that I started reconsidering if eggs were meat. On one Friday afternoon during Lent, the school served eggs as part of the lunch. I was a little confused but rolled with it because fish is technically meat but we can still eat that on Fridays so maybe eggs were the same way? 

I asked some of my friends and some upperclassmen about their thoughts on the topic and they all looked at me like I was crazy. I get “eggs are meat” sounds weird, but as a little kid being taught the food pyramid, eggs were always shown in the “meat” portion of the pyramid. Eggs definitely didn’t fit into any of the other food portions so that must mean eggs are meat. 

Now I know the term meat was the simplest way to explain to kids how they needed protein, without really explaining what protein was. I also know that eggs aren’t technically meat because the egg hasn’t been fertilized. Calling an egg meat would be like calling milk meat.

 Here’s where my vegetarianism comes out, I can’t stand the thought of eating another creature. If I have to eat meat due to medical reasons, I try to think of the animal it was, as little as possible. The same applies to eggs, all I can think about is how those could have been baby chickens, which just reinforced my thought of them being meat. 

The food pyramid should be explained a bit more in detail instead of with such basic terms. Maybe schools do that now, I haven’t been to elementary school in about seven years, which is not that long ago, but a lot can change in seven years. 

Schools never really touch on the topic of the food pyramid after elementary school. If there is a health class that includes the food pyramid, it’s the same basic stuff that was taught in elementary school. There should at least be a mini unit of a more in-depth food pyramid taught in middle school.

The education system is constantly receiving criticism and calls for reform. Explaining to kids how eggs aren’t meat would be a simple, and stupid to some, change to the curriculum. Every kid has had some simple misconception about life because it was just never addressed. We should start talking about these little mistakes so no one else ends up as the freshman who considered eggs meat.