Pizza is not a vegetable. Let's just get that out of the way right off the bat. It is cheesy, delicious, topped with all kinds of things, generally declares itself thin or thick crust and did I mention delicious? I'm actually eating a slice right now for lunch, but I'm sure as heck not counting it as one of my vegetable servings for the day.
The House GOP would like me to. Their new spending plan, proposed last week, is their way of scaling back more stringent guidelines on nutritional standards for school lunches which were released earlier this year by the USDA. They describe these guidelines and the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 as a "massive and costly federal intrusion."
The best line of the whole article is an expression of several in Congress who think the "government shouldn't be telling children what to eat." Whoever said that is silly. They are silly because the government has its mitts in every step of the process of what children eat, from where it's grown and in what quantities and with what chemical assistance, to how it's transported to the price it's sold for to literally in what state it can come through the door of that school. See? Wicked silly.
If all these people want to do is reinforce the current patterns of the government subsidizing growth of corn and potatoes and other crops that can be easily processed and transformed into pizza crusts, then of course we are going to continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars on obesity, in direct medical costs.
And besides that, school pizza wasn't even that good.
Tomato in some circles can be considered a vegetable, and I'm sure that is why they are defining it as such. With massive budgetary and taste (what will an unadventurous 8 year old eat anyway?) constraints on the public school system, what would you suggest that is feasible? The answer I am sure is nothing of substance. Though sometimes not perfect, we have to live in the real world. Part of living in the real world is understanding that if we can get kids to eat a serving of vegetable (not to mention a serving or two of dairy) and make lunch affordable for mass consumption, we are in a pretty good place. Point to a school system with better quality options and I will point to one of two things: a failing lunch program that won't have the money to last a month or a rich entitled district.
ReplyDeleteFrustratedModerate, thank you for your comment! Open discourse is the only way issues are completely thought through, and of course no one agrees on everything, so I appreciate you jumping in and throwing out some alternative ideas.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was hoping to convey in that blog entry is mostly that we cannot expect improvement of our current childhood obesity prevalence and rate if we maintain the same standards of nutritional quality for school lunches that have existed previously. In this country, there is a childhood obesity epidemic and we need to creatively and proactively try to solve it. Declaring pizza a vegetable gets creativity points but likely lacks effectiveness.
So, what I'm saying is, pizza can still be allowed in schools; its tomato sauce just should not be counted as a vegetable or a fruit.
At this point, there have been only a few widespread, thoughtful interventions in schools, not just those in well-to-do communities, to change the food offered at lunches (see "iMOVE intervention" in Quincy, MA and New Bedford, MA). Though not a large area of focus yet, previous efforts show promising results in increasing physical activity and healthy food choices by those unadventurous eight-year-olds.
Thank you for your readership, and I look forward to more intellectual contentions.