{"id":5563,"date":"2011-11-20T07:15:59","date_gmt":"2011-11-20T05:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ultimatefatburner.com\/?p=5563"},"modified":"2015-12-07T11:52:29","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T16:52:29","slug":"pizza-vegetable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/pizza-vegetable\/","title":{"rendered":"Pizza Is Not a Vegetable"},"content":{"rendered":"

So much for good intentions…<\/a><\/p>\n

Is pizza with tomato sauce a vegetable?<\/p>\n

Apparently yes, according to Congress, which on Monday blocked legislation that would have made school lunches healthier.<\/p>\n

In their final version of a spending bill that includes planning for the $11 billion National School Lunch Program, House and Senate committee members blocked or delayed major proposals from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that aimed to toughen nutritional standards for students’ subsidized meals.<\/p>\n

The USDA proposals – the first update to school-lunch nutritional guidelines in 15 years – suggested cutting back on salt; reducing starchy vegetables like potatoes, corn, lima beans and peas; and adding more fresh fruits and vegetables…The USDA also proposed not counting tomato paste on pizza as a vegetable.<\/p>\n

…Not surprisingly, frozen pizza makers and potato growers pushed back on the USDA proposals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is dumb. The number of children living in poverty is rising<\/a> – which means more kids\u00a0will be depending\u00a0on school lunches. And while some school districts have made significant progress, for all too many students, lunch still\u00a0resembles what Chicago teacher (and blogger\/author<\/a>)\u00a0Sarah Wu reported last year<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 2010, she ate school lunches every day, took pictures of the meals and blogged about it (anonymously). Her first meal was something called a \u201cbagel dog,\u201d or, as Wu describes it: \u201ca hot dog encased in soggy dough.\u201d Tater tots were the side dish and that day\u2019s fruit: \u201ca few cubes of pear suspended in bright red Jell-O.\u201d<\/p>\n

During her year of blogging, Wu realized that the food the students were eating was mainly reheated, frozen fare, sort of like TV dinners. Instead of fresh fruit, kids mainly ate fruit cups, slathered in a high-fructose corn syrup. The kids only got a 20-minute lunch break and no recess. So, she calculated that the kids had between 9 and 13 minutes to scarf down lunch.<\/p>\n

Wu realized the short lunch period meant the students would usually just drink the chocolate milk and slurp up the juice from the fruit cocktail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Margo Wootan of the CSPI put it:<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a shame that Congress seems more interested in protecting industry than protecting children’s health.<\/p>\n

At a time when child nutrition and childhood obesity are national health concerns, Congress should be supporting USDA and school efforts to serve healthier school meals, not undermining them. Together, the school lunch riders<\/a> in the agriculture spending bill would protect industry’s ability to keep pizza and French fries on school lunch trays every day of the week to the detriment of children’s health.<\/p>\n

If finalized, this legislation may go down in nutritional history as a bigger blunder than when the Reagan Administration tried (but failed) to credit ketchup as a vegetable<\/a> in the school lunch program. Pizza should be served with a vegetable, not count as one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree. We can, and should, be doing better for the children in this country.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So much for good intentions… Is pizza with tomato sauce a vegetable? Apparently yes, according to Congress, which on Monday blocked legislation that would have made school lunches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,23,28],"tags":[1149,1441],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5563"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10396,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5563\/revisions\/10396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}