Apparently the Congress had enough of overweight children in the US and wanted to make them healthier. So what did they do? Simple. They decided the tomato sauce on the pizza is a vegetable, and therefore, pizza is a vegetable. And just like that, kids are eating healthy pizzas. Or vegetables, if you want. I'm so glad I live in Norway sometimes.
Of course pizza is a vegetable. In fact, I'm just about to go out to my farm and harvest a crop of pizza. I planted several varieties this year: plain cheese; pepperoni and sausage; Hawaiian; and extra spicy with mushrooms, peppers, and anchovies. If the weevils haven't gotten to them, I should have a fine harvest.
To be perfectly fair pizza can be a healthy(ish) dish if done right and it's got lots of vegetables on it (tomatoes, cheese, onions ect.). Although whether these kids are being served healthy pizza is a different matter entirely.
pies are now a Vegetable as long as their is tomato sauce. guess i should stop haveing those white bufflo chicken slices
American logic for you. Ignore scientists and engineers, listen to politicians. We can do worse, just wait and watch.
The politicians are only partially to blame, the real reason is lobbying from the companies who make the processed foods that end up in cafeterias. French fries are also back on the menu after Obama tried to have them banned, because of lobbyists from American potato growers. It's kind of sad that Congress can agree to something as dumb as this, but not to a $17b job creation scheme. If this is really the best political system we can come up with, we suck.
The truth is that governments the world over proffer very dodgy dietary advice. A happy admixture of influential agri-business, very wonky, outdated science and dumb politicians. The trick is to pay no attention. The good news - provided more pizzas ( that is to say processed tomatoes ( that is to say lycopene)) are consumed - is that fewer American balls will succumb to cancer over the next few decades. Their owners will assuredly be dying of other things brought on by an atrocious diet but the balls will be safe and I think that is the important thing here.
That is a very serious, and excellent, point art. I think we were all missing the point. Thank you so much for reminding us all what is really important
Every time I see something as idiotic as this I just start laughing. At first it was quite depressing how stupid some people can be, but now its a very good laugh... If you see something like this why bother your mind with it? Just take it as a joke. Since its not really a joke, but reality, the funnier it is.
They're not. They're just saying that pizza is a vegetable. What we do with that rather surprising information is our own business.
That's not exactly true, they've tried to ban things. I don't know if they've succeeded because I'll be the first to admit I haven't really followed it, but I remember them trying to ban trans fats and stuff in NYC. Did they succeed with that? It's asinine.
well, I guess the wheat they made the flour from to make the pizza is of vegetable origin... at least it grows on the fields... Plus tomatoes ARe fruit, if you look at it scientifically. Which makes pizzas contain both fruit and veg! Now isn't that the perfect food? Olives (as in the oliveoil, at least in italy they use it on pizza) is some kind of fruit/vegetable... even the cows that produced the milk for the mozzarella might have been eating grass too... there you have it, your daily serving of fruit and greens.
It's not like the DEA is gonna raid your fridge looking for pizza. This whole pizza business relates to Obama's objectively very sensible plan to provide healthier options for children to eat while they're at public schools. Since people apparently lack the basic intelligence to know that shovelling processed foods into children's mouths day in and day out is not exactly healthy, I think it's not only admirable but entirely necessary for someone, government or not, to step up and give people a wake up call. The fact that corporations can overrule these kinds of decisions kinda makes a mockery of the whole idea of democracy, but it was a nice idea to begin with.
It was a nice idea, but it's America's general rationality that easier is better that is the problem. I make my kids chicken nuggets. But I MAKE them, out of chicken, and I BAKE them and they're not those nasty, frozen, deep fried things. And my kids eat french fries. But again, they're fresh potatoes, that I slice (skins on) and season, and BAKE, not fry. I actually cook, my kids eat the same things other kids too and hardly any of the nasty preservatives and crap. People need to stop thinking it's so HARD to cook a meal, that it takes so LONG, that it's so EXPENSIVE (it's WAY cheaper) and then maybe they'll actually get somewhere. But they're not going to do that.
Trish and Arron, I completely agree with you. isn't the health of your kids worth at least a little bit of effort?
And even if you don't have kids, yourself. I mean it's cheaper, it's healthier. It's not hard, it's no more time consuming, and there are recipes everywhere. Americans do what they're told. They're told it's hard, so it is. They're told it's messy, so it is. They're told they don't have time, so they don't.
Taking care of kids should have a much higher priority than it has. The kids are our future. But securing the future by handing them pizza? (I might be mistaken, but I think the issue was that kids don't get healthy food in schools, so they give them pizzas and call it a vegetable.) What about upgrading the school system to make it useful? What about helping young people get a job? What about changing the healthy care system so people can afford being sick? I mean if people in the US get sick and don't have insurance, they are pretty much screwed. Even with insurance, it can cost you a lot to be sick. Norway has it's issues too, of course. Take alcohol, as an example. Stores are open to 11:00 pm, yet they can't sell beer after 8:00 pm. So if you pick up a box of beer at 7:50 pm, then wait 11 minutes in line before you can pay for it, they can't sell it to you. How does that make any sense? Not to mention there are always trouble when the bars close at night in the weekends. So how do they solve it? Simple. Stop selling alcohol after 2:00 am. That solves everything, apparently.
I think part of the issue in the US is that the schools have tried to give the kids "real" food, but they won't eat it, because it doesn't taste the same as burgers and pizzas. They are used to that kind of food from home so they don't know what real food taste like and of course, being kids they don't bother with stuff like health-related issues. If people would give their kids good, homecooked food at home the schools wouldn't have to serve them pizzaslices to make sure they eat.
is the selling of alcohol monopolized in norway too, (like in sweden)? here we can buy only the low alcohol beers in the supermarket while you have to go to specific stores to get wine and stuff like that. just a curiosity.
