This just in: Pizza is a vegetable, sayz US congress

[astridv]

House protects pizza as a vegetable. (I googled around to check it's not a hoax because it sounds truly ridiculous.)

(Reuters) - The House of Representatives dealt a blow to childhood obesity warriors on Thursday by passing a bill that abandons proposals that threatened to end the reign of pizza and French fries on federally funded school lunch menus.

The scuttled changes, which would have stripped pizza's status as a vegetable and limited how often French fries could be served, stemmed from a 2010 child nutrition law calling on schools to improve the nutritional quality of lunches served to almost 32 million U.S. school children.

That's some mighty fine lobbying work right there. I'm getting a whiff of sulphur. That's beyond corrupt and going well into evil territory.

"Our concern is that the standards would force companies in many respects to change their products in a way that would make them unpalatable to students," Henry [spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute] said.

Won't somebody think of the children!!!1!

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Wednesday that U.S. school children would still see more fruit and vegetables, more grains, more low-fat milk and less salt and fat in meals despite the language in the spending bill.

"First of all, we can assure parents of school-age children (that) USDA will do everything it can" to improve the nutritional quality of school meals, as required by the 2010 child nutrition law.

Comments

[acari]

Another provision bars the USDA from changing the way it credits tomato paste, used in pizza. The change would have required pizza to have at least a half-cup of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving. Current rules, which likely will remain in place, require just two tablespoons of tomato paste.

That is nuts.

[astridv]

Yep. Plus, the tomato paste itself already contains so much sugar that it should be better classified as a desert. I like ketchup but I don't kid myself that it's a vegetable just because there's a tomato on the label.

[acari]

Yeah, the reason why children nowadays think natural food tastes weird/bad is that they've been fed over-sugared/fake aromatised/additive enriched crap.

[ratcreature]

I suspect the problem is more that if the main concern is to keep it cheap they'll serve crappy pizza that is a fatty glob from plenty of processed pseudo-cheese, no vegetables (of the non-tomato paste kind) as toppings, and all white flour. Of course it is somewhat ridiculous to count just the tomato paste as enough for a vegetable portion, but if it wasn't primarily a cost issue, why wouldn't they just put two handful of veggies on top of the tomato paste (one that actually was mostly concentrated tomato with spices or such, not a chemical marvel of food engineering), be moderate with cheese that was actual cheese, use whole wheat flour for the dough and so on, and still be allowed to serve pizza as a decent meal? I mean, it is not that pizza is inherently super unhealthy.

OTOH what use is forbidding pizza if the school lunch budget is too tight to actually use high quality ingredients for anything? The non-pizza food prepared under the same constraint is unlikely to be much better. I mean, you don't get organically farmed steamed rainbow trout for the price of gross fish sticks, that likely are only edible taste-wise because they are fried, either. Or decent meat to the price of the ground mystery meat patty or hot dog sausage. And the main way to make crappy ingredients tasty is to have them at least fatty, and food engineered for mouth feel and such.

[astridv]

Oh yeah, it all comes down to money. The school board don't want to spend the amount they'd actually have to in order to feed the kids healthy food every day, and the fast food companies fear a drop in their profit.

Of course it's a short-sighted calculation, saving money for food now and have the huge bill presented in the future. Apart from the moral aspect of essentially poisoning kids. That's what it is. Low-dose, long term poisoning.

The non-pizza food prepared under the same constraint is unlikely to be much better.

Actually I disagree with that. There are ways to get more veggies and less grease in that are low-cost, if you look for it and are creative. It's not an either-or deal, either the cheapest junk available or a high-end meal. There are vegetables that are comparedly cheap, even in the states. You can boil potatoes instead of deep-frying them. And throwing in less salt, sugar, preservatives and the like should make no difference financially (and the stuff only tastes good to fast-food eaters because their taste buds are trained to like it). I just watched a speach by Jamie Oliver in which he pointed out how much additional sugar is just in the school milk alone. The suppliers put sugar in milk so the kids would drink more of it.

[ratcreature]

You are right that it not just a cost factor. I mean, I know that it is possible to make decent meals on a budget (I spend an average of €3-4 per day on my food and that is for all meals and with the added cost of cooking for a single person), but none of the dishes I regularly eat today are things I cared for as child, it's things like vegetable-lentil stew. Though maybe I would have liked healthier food if my family's food habits had been healthier, after all children get habituated to foods from their parents, which creates the problem to begin with after all.

My pessimistic view is that if you legislate the pizza, the most likely step is that the providers look for something that would be as easily accepted and comparatively cheap, and they end up say having a crappy lasagna with fatty processed cheese instead, because that doesn't fall under the pizza prohibition but children also like it and thus there wouldn't be too much fuss, effort or cost involved.

That's not to say that I'm against regulating nutrition content together with other rules for school food, and maybe school efforts to healthier eating have their part, especially if it is done in the earliest stages like kindergarten and pre-school to create good habits (e.g. after all our school lectures on healthy eating I asked to have muesli for breakfast as a kid instead of the delicious, unhealthy danishes my mother got every morning from the bakery, despite being mocked as eating bird feed by my parents, not that it prevented me from being fat but I guess there was some impact), but I don't see why legislation that micromanages down to the level of specific foods makes any sense. Except of course that they probably started out with some sensible regulation like "All school lunches have to comply with the nutrition guideline for children detailed in appendix A" or something like that, and then one special interest after another lobbied for exemptions or conditional exemptions and so on and you end up with a law like this that specifical mentions french fries or pizza or the like.

[astridv]

Yeah, the pizza-as-a-vegetable is symptom, not the root of the problem.

(e.g. after all our school lectures on healthy eating I asked to have muesli for breakfast as a kid instead of the delicious, unhealthy danishes my mother got every morning from the bakery, despite being mocked as eating bird feed by my parents,

Wow, yeah, good parenting at work. Was that back in the eighties? It sounds familiar. Back when the thought of eating healthy and organic was new and therefore something for freaks. Körnerfreaks. We didn't get pastries for breakfast or anything as bad, my mom always cooked healthy food, I'm so grateful for that. But I got mocked from my dad's side of the family when I went vegetarian and was into whole grains and stuff. (eating bird feed, that was exactly what I got to hear. :P)

I'm just watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on youtube. I'm up to ep 3 and it's utterly fascinating. His program is about providing healthy food on a budget; I think the deal he made is that he can't go over the normal budget, I'm curious how that's gonna work out in the long run. But lord, you can tell right from the beginning that inintiating change is hard. And it looks like a big part of the problems comes in the form of red tape and idiotic food guidelines (according to which french fries count as a vegetable as well, so a meal with fried chicken on a white roll with a side order of french fries counts as a wholesome meal whereas the delicious veggie stirfry Jamie made didn't meet the nutrition guidelines.)

btw, my roommate had rented a book from the library called "Arm aber Bio", how to live on organic food on a Hartz 4 budget. I wouldn't have thought that was possible at all but she says it is, though one has to struggle a bit. She wants to buy the book, I must check out some of the recipies.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, the muesli comments were in the 1980s. Later I got mocked for becoming vegetarian too, and it was difficult because unlike my brother who became vegan only after he moved out, I was still living at home. And my mother wasn't any good at vegetarian cooking, and my father didn't want to eat vegetarian anyway (so it's not like I could offer to cook for everyone), and two people preparing separate meals caused conflict too, especially because my mother took my decision as a slight against her and her cooking. Which wasn't bad (if on the traditional side) when she was sober, but my mother was an alcoholic (she refused to admit it, but well, someone who's regularly passed out drunk by afternoon, it's not really a borderline case at that point), and everything suffers from that. So often when mother cooked she used quite a lot of convenience foods, stuff like frozen Königsberger Klopse and things like that, and there was the pretty much unlimited availability of sweets when you asked for them. Looking back I think in part with the sweets she may have wanted to make up for the other issues (that guilt financed a huge part of my comic collection too actually, because it was really easy to get money from her). All that combined didn't lead to a very healthy diet.

[less_star]

... wow! Like you said, someone's been very effective in their lobbying.