the four basic food groups

The beauty of these is that they aren't mutually exclusive; a given food item can belong to more than one, or in some cases all of them at once.

1. Crunchy
   
   Chips, pretzels, anything fried, cheese curls.
   
   
2. Salty
   
   Anything where salt is a significant component of the flavor.
   
   
3. Brown
   
   This is self-explanatory. Coffee is brown, as is good beer. Tobacco is brown too.
   
   
4. Fermented
   
   The fermented group includes not only beer, wine, shoyu, miso, and whatnot, but also (according to halacha, if I recall correctly) any bread product made with leavening. Cheese also may be considered fermented, assuming it's real cheese and not some kind of petroleum byproduct glop like American "cheese".

A genuinely nourishing meal needs to include all of the above groups. Beer and pretzels would be a good example of a complete meal: Both are brown, beer is fermented, and pretzels are crunchy and salty. I'm not certain, but pretzels may be leavened as well; if so, this would make them something of an ideal food.

"Foods" which fall outside the above system (e.g. ice cream, green olives) are to be considered "snacks" or "condiments" with no nutritional value. Vegetables are not fit for human consumption and so need not be discussed. Petroleum byproduct glop is good stuff in principle, but it provides no nourishment.

The ‘Four Basic Food Groups,’ an outdated concept drilled into the heads of generations of Americans and still widely accepted as the basic outline of a healthy diet, began as a 50s era attempt at nutrition education, and later evolved into a sop to agri-business.

In 1956, the United States Department of Agriculture published a leaflet called Food For Fitness - A Daily Food Guide. It contained, among other things, a division of the commonly eaten foods of the time into four groups, based on their general nutritive properties. These groups, as we all know, were:

(1) “The Meat Group” – meats, poultry, fish, dry beans and peas, eggs, and nuts;
(2) “The Dairy Group” - milk, cheese, and yogurt;
(3) “The Grain Group” - bread, pasta, cereal,
(4) “Fruits and Vegetables”

Nothing was stated about the relative amounts of these foods necessary for an optimal diet, at least in part because not much was known. ‘Eat a food from each of the groups at every meal’ was a standard rule of thumb, and in the ‘four groups’ educators had a handy tool for edifying.

However, as the decades went by, the medical community, and then large segments of society, began to learn that things like lowering saturated fat intake and eating more fresh vegetables might be a good idea. So might eating newly available foods like soy. However, much of the mission of the USDA was and is to promote America’s agricultural produce. Here is an inherent conflict of interest - the same people whose job it is to promote what is currently grown and herded are telling us what to eat!

It took until 1992 for the four groups to be updated, and then it was in the half-assed way that led to the ridiculous Food Pyramid. Now there was an additional conflict of interest – heavy lobbying from agri-business. For instance, the final version of the pyramid included a pinnacle of “Fats, Oils, and Sweets,” as a direct sop to sugar producers, even though these items were in no danger of being lacking from the American diet. Among other non-accidental flaws, dairy substitutes with the same nutritional properties as dairy products, widely available by the early 90s, were suspiciously missing from the ‘Dairy’ section of the pyramid, and the ‘Grain’ section made no distinction between nutritious whole grains and processed products like Wonderbread.

Well, it seems there’s no hope for government to get this one right. So here are the New Four Food Groups as outlined by the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine:

1)The Whole Grain Group - 5 servings a day
2) The Legume (bean) and soy foods Group - 5 servings a day
3) The Vegetable Group - 3 servings a day
4) The Fruit Group - 3 servings a day