Young Writers Society

As many of us now know, pizza has been officially declared a vegetable. Here, you can express your views on this, what you think the pros and cons are, and how this may affect people. Should it be called a vegetable? Does this really benefit people's lives?

Please, share any thoughts you have at all upon this subject.

I've lived all my life believing Pizza as one of "junk foods." Now to think it's a vegetable, and vegetables are supposed to be healthy- it's like an identity crisis, you know?

Uhm, honestly I think it's ridiculous. We can't go around calling everything that has veggies in it a vegetable. There's a clear difference between a vegetable and food that is cooked. If this were the case, onion rings and even fries should be called a 'vegetable.' The logic quite fails here.

Does this really benefit people's lives

I don't think it would. Calling something by any other name doesn't strip it of its merits and demerits. It doesn't change much except that there now exists a strange official view.
If I called broccoli 'pizza', would people eat it? (Eh, I like broccoli)

Now, another thing is, the sauce they use is largely made of tomato. Tomatoes are fruits. More identity crisis here!

This is a problem because nutritionists and scientists guided public policy to improve health and nutrition in children. Companies like ConAgra come in, throw money at Congress, and erase the work that science has done.

The whole outrage behind "pizza is a vegetable" isn't even about fruits and vegetables. It's about the obvious power of lobbying. While people are technically wrong in saying that pizza is a vegetable, it is equally wrong that such blatant corporate lobbying resulted in Congress ignoring science for yet another pay-off. Our Congress is bought, and people need to be upset for the right reason.

Finally!

More reason to pick up the phone up and call Pizza hut (what flavour to order.. hmm)

Finally!

More reason to pick up the phone up and call Pizza hut (what flavour to order.. hmm)

Exactly! What took them so long?!

No, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable. Tomato paste was what was really being discussed. If actually read the bill, nowhere will you see the word "pizza." School cafeterias do not have a free pass to serve pizza; the food item alone in all it's greasy goodness is not considered a vegetable.
Food is measured and classified in two way - by volume and by nutritional value. The most recent nutritional guidelines stated that half a cup of tomato puree or paste would be equal to one serving of vegetables. However, when something is defined as a vegetable, it is reassessed according to nutritional value. Thus now, according to purely nutritional value, one-eighth of a cup of tomato pure or paste is equivalent in nutritional value to a serving of vegetables. This is all the bill has done. All the media attention has really blown this out of proportion. Pizza really has nothing to do with it.

tr3x wrote:No, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable. Tomato paste was what was really being discussed. If actually read the bill, nowhere will you see the word "pizza." School cafeterias do not have a free pass to serve pizza; the food item alone in all it's greasy goodness is not considered a vegetable.
Food is measured and classified in two way - by volume and by nutritional value. The most recent nutritional guidelines stated that half a cup of tomato puree or paste would be equal to one serving of vegetables. However, when something is defined as a vegetable, it is reassessed according to nutritional value. Thus now, according to purely nutritional value, one-eighth of a cup of tomato pure or paste is equivalent in nutritional value to a serving of vegetables. This is all the bill has done. All the media attention has really blown this out of proportion. Pizza really has nothing to do with it.

@ Tr3x: Thanks for pointing that out. It DOES have to do with pizza though, since the paste is what those big food corporations use on their frozen pizza, sold at school cafeterias.

@ The rest of you:

PIZZA IS A VEGETABLE,
WAR IS PEACE,
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Tr3x is right; the tomato paste is the 'vegetable' in question, though I do have my doubts about the nutritious qualities of that stuff.

Anyway, I had a train of thought there...ah, right! Pizza doesn't necessarily have to be junk food. If made with the right ingredients, it can be nutritious and delicious. This is the case with many pre-made foods that you can buy from the grocery store; if they were just made with better ingredients, they would not only be tasty and ready-to-eat, but they would also do less harm.

Three of the most common unhealthy ingredients in food are high fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and aspartame. I almost guarantee that you could find all three of those in most school meals. So if schools really want to make their food more nutritious (which I kinda doubt), they could start with eliminating at least a portion of the food containing those things--especially the MSG and aspartame. It's getting easier to find acceptable substitutes that still taste good.

Fresh veggies would help, too. The canned stuff (in my experience, at least) is sometimes pretty bad for you, and it usually tastes terrible.


Just my opinion, of course. I've never even been to a cafeteria, so I may not even know what I'm talking about...

tr3x wrote:No, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable. Tomato paste was what was really being discussed. If actually read the bill, nowhere will you see the word "pizza." School cafeterias do not have a free pass to serve pizza; the food item alone in all it's greasy goodness is not considered a vegetable.
Food is measured and classified in two way - by volume and by nutritional value. The most recent nutritional guidelines stated that half a cup of tomato puree or paste would be equal to one serving of vegetables. However, when something is defined as a vegetable, it is reassessed according to nutritional value. Thus now, according to purely nutritional value, one-eighth of a cup of tomato pure or paste is equivalent in nutritional value to a serving of vegetables. This is all the bill has done. All the media attention has really blown this out of proportion. Pizza really has nothing to do with it.

Thank you for pointing this out. I was unsure how to explain that pizza has little to do with the bill. Don't know who started arguing about the "school cafeteria" bit, but it's funny... every public school I've been to serves pizza.

ConAgra thought it would cut into their profits, so they lobbied Congress to keep the old regulation that the new measurement of tomato paste still qualifies as a serving of vegetables. Because Congress kept the existing regulation, people think this reclassifies pizza, because it includes tomato paste, as a vegetable. I still don't know why it has anything to do with it either. I'm still like yeah, what?

I spread two tablespoons of tomato paste on my birthday cake, so now I call cake a vegetable...

NO. WRONG, INCORRECT!
Yeah, Pizza may be made with several different kinds of vegetables, but Pizza as a whole is NOT a vegetable. It is still a greasy, cheesy, garbled mess of a food (depending on which country you're getting it from )

tr3x, Thanks for clearing it up.

Only question is why did they do it? So that there can be a better measure of nutrients in pureed food? But as Payne said, HFCS must be monitored.

In reply to Payne's comment above:
The idea that mono-sodium glutamate is highly unhealthy is a really widespread misconception that is based off a series of highly publicized studies that turned out to be false. In the experiment, rats were given high amounts of MSG (10g per serving) which were consequently linked to blindness. However, an adult human being consumes at the most 4g of MSG in a week. The same could be concluded of many substances that are vital to human survival (iodine for example, in necessary for your thyroid gland to function, but can be unhealthy in large concentrated doses). Further, various double blind studies that used both placebos and food that contained MSG concluded that there is no relation between the presence of MSG and the symptoms reported by patients who claim to suffer from MSG sensitivity.
Further studies:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16999713
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10736382
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10597625

Conclusion:

MSG has a widespread reputation for eliciting a variety of symptoms, ranging from headache to dry mouth to flushing. Since the first report of the so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome 40 years ago, clinical trials have failed to identify a consistent relationship between the consumption of MSG and the constellation of symptoms that comprise the syndrome. Furthermore, MSG has been described as a trigger for asthma and migraine headache exacerbations, but there are no consistent data to support this relationship. Although there have been reports of an MSG-sensitive subset of the population, this has not been demonstrated in placebo-controlled trials.

On top of this, MSG is a naturally occurring compound in a lot of South-Asian cuisine.

You are, however, quite correct about high-fructose corn syrup. It is decidedly unhealthy. The jury is still out on aspartame (which is a common additive in artificial sweeteners), with conflicting studies being published very frequently, but it's probably bad for you.

Maybe a better description would be an overall healthy meal.

Ingredients:

Tomato (paste as well),
Cheese,
Bread,
Pepper,
Onion,
Mushroom

Well that looks healthy enough.

And we've even got a bit of meat to put on it! Veeeeery healthy All that makes it unhealthy is when people don't make it at home.

A..... A....... A veggie? I love to eat vegetables, now!