Is Pizza a Vegetable?

For the U.S. Congress, yes. A little tomato sauce on a slice of pizza may be counted as a vegetable in American school cafeterias… and there is nothing more to say about it, ruled representatives and senators responsible for approving a new agriculture funding law on Tuesday. The Obama administration — which, especially under Michelle’s leadership, wants to make the fight against obesity a major national cause — had proposed to at least increase the amount of tomato sauce on pizza… so that it could be considered a vegetable. It was still too much for Congress, which also refused to fund a reduction in the amount of potatoes and sodium served to children.

Lobbyists for the food industry, which had fought against this regulation, may triumph: Adding tomato sauce to pizzas would have made them less appetizing, and we would have spent billions for dishes that children would not have wanted to eat, they argued.

The new, somewhat healthier rules, promoted by the Department of Agriculture, would have cost 14 cents more per meal, the Department calculated. Multiplied by the number of small eaters, this would have created an additional cost of $6.8 billion in five years.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration also sought to have ketchup recognized as a vegetable, but did not succeed. There are, all the same, some limits…