Taking The Pizza?

And you thought the US Congress was COMPLETELY useless?
Washington was recently reported to have declared that “pizza is a vegetable”.
Cue headlines around the world and much hand-wringing about whether legislators understood the scale of the obesity problem facing the country.
The spectacular “super-fail” of the deficit-reduction committee has only increased anger amongst ordinary Americans about their Congress.
The problem is that the “pizza is a vegetable” story isn’t entirely as it seems.
As the Washington Post points out, the offending bit of legislation, a revised agriculture appropriations bill, doesn’t contain the word ‘pizza’ or ‘vegetable’.
It does mention ‘tomato paste’ and addresses whether an eighth of a cup of it should be credited with the same nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables, as currently happens.
The Obama administration has issued new guidelines which said it should take half a cup of tomato paste to equal half a cup of vegetables.
That is what Congress blocked after some pretty hefty lobbying from the pizza industry ($5.6 million worth of lobbying according to the New York Times) because it is easier and cheaper to produce what they produce now.
It certainly is a defeat for the administration’s attempts to get America’s children eating a more healthy diet.
Maybe it is hard to see why anyone would oppose attempts to encourage everyone to eat more healthily but lobbyists and anti-big-government groups have a big voice.
So while Congress DIDN’T actually declare pizza a vegetable, it probably doesn’t deserve a great deal of credit for what it DID do.