Is Pizza a Vegetable? Well, Congress Says So

By Lizz Winstead, Guardian UK

19 November 11

What does childhood nutrition matter next to the frozen food industry's wishes? Just don't ask what the pepperoni's made of.

ey, America! The GOP is, yet again, looking out for you. This week, Congress took a break from voting to make sure none of your tax dollars will go to all those abortion clinics NPR wants to open in our national parks, to pass a federal law that only the nation that invented Febreze would tolerate.

They have affirmed that pizza is a vegetable. Yes, the tomato sauce on pizza is enough for American politicians to define it and allow it to be served as a vegetable in school lunch programs across the US.

Never mind that tomatoes are a fruit, and commercial tomato sauce has so much sugar in it that not only is it not a vegetable, but it should be classified as a dessert. In fact, it takes a big set of balls to even call school lunch pizza, um, pizza. I think the only chance we have of instilling any sense into these politicians is if we douse it with squirt cheese and serve it in a microwaveable pouch.

And poor Michelle Obama. The First Lady is working so hard to get kids to put down the Cool Ranch deep-fried tobacco dogs, or whatever it is they concoct with that meat substance pet food companies rejected that got sold to public schools. It is a Sisyphean task just to get these lunch programs to serve something, anything, fresh and healthy that hasn't been grown with Major League Baseball-style steroids. Why? Because we live in America, where people, who have been elected to public office, do not believe in climate science, but do believe pizza is a vegetable. I envy your tenacity, FLOTUS.

I knew big Pharma and the NRA had powerful lobbies, but apparently, the frozen food industry's "partially hydrogenated, tomato-ish sauce-coated, food-like cardboard substance" lobby is more influential than I had initially realised. And these big food giants have done wonders convincing us all fresh produce is insurmountably inconvenient and, like lemmings, we go along with it, buying pre-packaged versions of these clearly inedible options.

And it's not just vegetables. Fruit has also been bastardised as just too much of a nuisance to eat, so enter the frankenfooders to simplify it for us. Fruit Roll-Ups? They have brainwashed us into believing the burden of hauling around an apple or a pear had become so daunting, we needed someone to mix up fruit with some corn syrup and "Roll It Up."

See? Now we do eat fruit because it's easier. So you never have to experience that pesky fresh fruit juice squirting you in the eye or, worse, to stress out having to get up off the couch to wash it. You can just "unroll it." And it never goes bad. Ever. It's practically a miracle.

So, in a country where fertilised eggs are people and assembling burgers is a manufacturing job, and berries are better in the form of shoe leather, why not call a sugary fruit paste sauce that comes out of a can and is poured onto dough that comes out of a box, topped with cheese that's spelt Cheez and comes out of a Whiz, a vegetable.

And in case you were wondering, yes, Axe Body spray is now considered a bath.