How Pizza Became A Vegetable Through The Magic Of Influence-Peddling

On Tuesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. I have to imagine that this news instilled confusion in many Americans, as many Americans are (a) familiar with pizza, (b) familiar with vegetables and (c) sane.

But, to provide specifics that will in no way dispel your lingering thoughts that we are governed by morons but at least allow you some anthropological insight into how a group of morons who have been given permission to sit in a fancy room in Washington, D.C., and grunt at each other actually think, here is their thinking: Pizza is a vegetable for the purposes of determining what goes into public school lunches by virtue of the fact that pizza traditionally includes a schmear of tomato paste. (Botanically speaking, tomatoes are actually fruit, but we're going to have to just let that slide.)

Read article at:

www.huffingtonpost.com...

Well, I have a couple thoughts on this:

1. Nice, pizza is now considered nutritious - don't have to feel bad when eating.
2. WHAT THE HELL. 15 trillion dollars in debt, and they are working on pizza toppings?

Unreal.....what says ATS?

Reminds me of when the Reagan administration declared that in schools, ketchup is a vegetable. Yep. If they had chicken and french fries with ketchup, they claimed they had a meat and two veggies.

After he was out of office, and we "fixed it", we laughed about it. And here it is again.

But really,pizza can contain vegetables. Of course, maybe they will just put ketchup on it, and say it has vegetables.

Actually, this won't effect anybody much but the poor children who get their main meals at school, but really, that's what they're after isn't it?

Population reduction?

Great

Now I get to eat 5 a day and know it's good for me

Of wait it's just another misleading headline quoted for effect

The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.

this makes perfect sense for a nation that has an obesity epidemic.

Proper hamburger is a vegetable too. Look at all the lettuce and onion.

USA school children are fed junk food. Hamburgers, chips, french fries, pizzas, chicken fingers, candy bars.....

I work in a frozen pizza factory, on a good day we churn out 250,000 from both shifts combined. All i can say about the tomato sauce is that it's mostly water containg just a bit of tomato paste, and we thicken it up with starch,... but shhhhhh!!!! don't tell anyone. Anyway you would never know the difference.

It took a President in the 90's to have our children educating us on what isn't an intimate act, but only Congress can actually manage renaming junk food into a food group...and the wrong one at that. Now I HAVE seen everything.

By these standards, Jessica Simpson should be your president

This is just another fine example of CORPORATE CONTROL of the Govenment.

This has nothing to do with nutrition. FOLLOW THE MONEY!

Washington — Congress agreed this week to continue counting the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables for federally-sponsored school lunches.

In doing so, it sided with one of biggest makers of frozen pizza for school lunches the Schwan Food Co. of Marshall, Minn., a frozen pizza giant with more than $3 billion a year in annual sales. The privately held company was at the heart of the lobbying battle in Washington over pizza and convinced several members of Minnesota's congressional delegation to follow its lead.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison and Republican U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen were the only Minnesota members of Congress to vote against the bills.

Schwan Food pizza brands include Red Baron, Freschetta and Tony's Pizza. Besides the products it sells to consumers, Schwan's does a big business selling frozen pizza to the federally-subsidized school lunch program.

A recent press release from the company boasts that it has a 70 percent market share in the pizza category of the $9.5 billion school food service industry.

So when the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed new, stricter nutritional standards for school lunches earlier this year, it set off a massive lobbying campaign by Schwan and companies such as food giant ConAgra.

In particular, they honed in on a rule that would give tomato paste — a key pizza ingredient — less nutritional credit than under the old rules.

Federal lobbying records show that Schwan and the American Frozen Food Institute, the industry's trade association, spent about $450,000 on lobbying this year, although the information available to the public doesn't say how much was spent on this issue alone.

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Link to Story

Originally posted by ZeroKnowledge
Proper hamburger is a vegetable too. Look at all the lettuce and onion.

Hamburgers are a super food that contain the 5 essential food groups.

Cereal/grain = the bun
Dairy = the cheese
Meat/poultry = the pattie
Vegetable = the lettuce, onion etc.
Fruit = tomato

Long live the hamburger, the breakfast of champions

reply to post by weirdguy


Pizza also has all 5, albeit with a lot more options.

reply to post by GoldenObserver


Too right mate, who says junk food is bad for you hey