pizza could be a vegetable if it has enough vegetables in it.

When the story first broke that the food lobby wanted pizza to count as a vegetable in school lunches, I knew there was more to the story.  But of course, the major news sites are more interested in ratings/circulation than getting the facts straight so they did a lot of opinionating and left out the rational part of the argument.  So now that the furor has died down, if you are interested in what really happened, here is the story behind the story.

How much tomato constitutes one serving?  That is a purely nutritional question that nutritionists have been answering for years.  The existing standards before the controversy made the equivalent of ¼ cup of tomato sauce equal to one serving.  As you all know, budgets are tight.  So school systems asked if they could call 2 Tbsps of tomato sauce as a serving.  This is about half as much.  This would save them a lot of money because they could use less tomato sauce in their pastas, etc. etc.  Well, it turns out that 2 Tbsps of tomato sauce is the amount that is in the size of the pizza that many school systems serve.  So if they changed the standard, pizza would all of a sudden have a serving of vegetables in it – 2 Tbsp of tomato sauce. 

So nobody claimed that pizza itself should be a vegetable.  It was just a question of whether 2 Tbsp or ¼ cup of tomato sauce should be called one serving.  The pizza angle was just an unfortunate side effect that made for much better news stories.  And got the pizza lobby all excited.

Of course, I disagree with the approach to shortchange our kids by halving the amount of vegetables we give them.  So if ¼ cup of tomatoes provides the nutrition needed to count as one serving, they shouldn’t be playing games with that amount just to save money.  But the decision has nothing to do with pizza.  Even with the old standard, pizza could count as a vegetable if they put ¼ cup of tomato sauce on it.