U.S. Congress declares pizza a vegetable
Yesterday, some House Republicans decided that, for the sake of school lunches, pizza ought to be considered a vegetable. More precisely, what is being declared a vegetable is the pizza sauce that’s used on top of a lump of carbohydrates and under a mass of grease-laden cheese full of saturated fats. - Based on the 2009 recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently released new guidelines for public school lunches. These guidelines initially faced resistance from potato industry lobbyists because of the limits his guidelines placed on the amount of potatoes that children could eat at school – specifically limiting the amount of potatoes served to one cup per student per week. Emerging from the lobbying efforts against these guidelines were plenty of misleading arguments about the nutritional value of potatoes and how they could be considered a “gateway vegetable” to other more nutritious vegetables like broccoli, carrots, or kale. In fact, The National Potato Council was so influential during these lobbying efforts that it prompted members of Congress to publicly question the research which suggests that dark green vegetables are healthier than potatoes.