It’s both, per the wikipedia article on it:
But their eating standards may be. Perhaps a predominately Jewish school with Kosher food.
I think it’s fine if some kid has pizza for lunch. However, I don’t think that pizza should be considered a vegetable, and thus eligible for federal support as such.
Look, during my junior and senior year in high school I ate at Taco Bell, for the most part. However, I wasn’t eligible for a free or subsidized lunch from the Feds. My grandparents gave me a weekly allowance for me to use to buy lunch and whatever else I could afford. The high school allowed juniors and seniors to go off-campus for lunch, and most of us did. But the Feds didn’t pay for lunches or snacks at Taco Bell or McDonald’s, they only paid for lunches and snacks at the school cafeteria.
I think that a subsidized lunch should meet certain nutrition guidelines. The POINT of a subsidized lunch is that it provides essential nutrition.
It’s a salad fruit like avocardos. I love them raw and consider them a low-sugar alternative to apples . (n=1)
That;s a really dishonest way of framing the issue. The point is that tomato based pizza sauce can quite accurately be described as a vegetable, or maybe you would like to go the way of Fruit?
It’s semantics, in the UK at least, the 5-a-day can include both fruits and vegetables.
What isn’t, is the fact that very few tomatoes actually go into pizza, the puree is mostly sugar and water if I’m not mistaken.
There’s not really enough tomato paste/sauce on pizza for it to count as a serving of fruit or vegetable. That’s really the issue. Ragu spaghetti sauce says that half a cup of sauce is equivalent to two servings of veggies. But if you put even a quarter of a cup of sauce on a slice of pizza, that’s gonna be one soggy slice. Even if you add other veggies like onions and bell peppers and mushrooms, one slice of pizza is STILL not going to have enough veggies to qualify as even one vegetable serving.
Pizza is basically a serving of starch with a little dairy, a little vegetable, and maybe some protein. But it shouldn’t qualify as a vegetable serving at all. MAYBE it qualifies as a dairy and protein serving, depending on how much cheese is on it.
I don’t think they seriously believe that Pizza is a vegetable, but take pizza , fries or Hamburgers off the menu and a lot of kids won’t eat anything. I cooked in a high school and a good 30 % wanted only that. The lunches their parents sent with them was also thrown in the garbage, the women that cleared the cafateria got enough fruit for the year to eat every day they took home oranges, apples ,pears or other fruits.. The kids just threw the whole bag in the garbage without even opening it!
They would eat potato chips,taco’s but not salads.
(Not being funny)
Donuts can be considered a vegetable.
Sugar comes from sugarcane. Maybe a little out of the realm for a vegetable, but it does grow naturally from the ground. The vegetarians and vegans are saying that living creatures should not die for their food (although plants die for their diet) and to them, anything that comes from the soil is natural and good.
Donuts (coreect me if I am wrong) comes from wheat, and it is similar to bread. It is bread, basically a sugared bagel. No animal died making a donut unless the fat was made from an animal. If the donuts was fried in corn oil (Homer Simpson: MMMMM, Corn Oil!), then it is legally a vegetable product.
Vegetarian pizza is a vegetable. Again, the crust is made from wheat, tomato (ok, a fruit, but fruit is good for you) and whatever vegetable toppings one wants. Add tofu and spice it up like meat to fool the youngins. As a matter of fact, BEER, which is made from again, wheat and water is also a vegetable. In fact any intoxicating beverage comes from rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, water and sugar. All natural and except for excess sugar, completely natural and green. But I doubt that Tony Dow Junior High will have Wild Turkey on it’s menu.
No one is proposing to make “pizza” a vegetable.
I disagree. If your goal is to provide nutrition (which, I believe, is or at least should be the goal of any school lunch program), then basing nutrition on the raw version of processed foods in no way promotes health and well-being. And isn’t that what school lunches ought to do?
To use your example, the nutritional profile of one cup of raw spinach is not the same as that of 1/2 cup of cooked spinach since many of the nutrients found in raw spinach are cooked out of it and further processing to extend shelf-life of pre-cooked spinach often further damages remaining nutrients (freezing) or introduces excessive amounts of sodium (canning). So you can’t reliably provide complete nutrition without taking into account the effect of that processing on the end result.
IANARD but it seems to me that school meal guidelines should be based on the actual nutritional values, including the ratios of (at the very least) macronutrients, vitamins, and macrominerals (i.e., sodium, calcium, iron, et al) of the foods as served in accordance with the nutritional needs of children. A sensible menu plan provides a healthful ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrate. It provides necessary minerals and vitamins as naturally present and combined in a wide variety of whole foods to aid absorption and uptake of those nutrients in reasonably healthful amounts.
Counting vegetables is a simplified method to attempt to meet nutritional needs, but it’s subject to the exact type of manipulation we’re seeing here in which the primary goal of meal planning becomes Cater to Corporate Profit-Making. Once those values shift, it comes at the expense of the nutritional health of the schoolchildren, many of whom rely heavily on options outside the home for a decent meal.
Really? You can’t tell the difference nutritionally between a slice of pizza with 2 tbsps of tomato paste and, say, a 1/2 cup of broccoli vs a slice of pizza with 8 tbsps of tomato paste?
You do realize that most tomato paste is typically canned with loads of salt in it and that four times the sodium is not all that healthy when you consider what’s being served with that pizza (check out the third image).
Would you even eat a slice of pizza with 8 tbsps of tomato paste on it?
Who said anything about broccoli? I don’t think tomato paste is very nutritious, so giving someone 4 times as much isn’t going to do much good. And no one is proposing putting 1/2 cup of tomato paste on a pizza.
The point is that if you can count 2 tbsp of tomato paste as one vegetable then you don’t have to provide one actual vegetable (i.e., broccoli) that provides nutrients that tomato paste does not in your meal plan. Alternately, if you can’t make a slice of pizza with 8 tbsp of tomato paste (or 1 vegetable), then you have to figure out another way to meet the guidelines that requires x amount of vegetables like adding actual vegetables (i.e., broccoli) to your meal plan.
By changing the guideline that allows 2 tbsp of tomato paste to be equivalent to one vegetable, the goal is to remove pizza in its typical school lunch form as an option in a nutritionally sensible school meal plan. Considering the basic lack of nutrition of today’s typical school lunch pizza (usu. cheese or processed meat-based, high in sodium and carbohydrates but low in fiber and antioxidants found in fresh produce), it makes a lot of sense.
Right now, the tomato sauce on pizza is counted as a vegetable, for the purpose of determining federal subsidies. So in one sense you’re right, no one is proposing to MAKE pizza a vegetable. However, in another sense you’re wrong. There are people who want to KEEP counting pizza sauce as a full serving of a vegetable.
So the basic story is this:
Low-nutrition frozen pizza is common on school lunch menus due to a loophole in federal law that allows it to count as fulfilling the “vegetable” requirement.
A whole economy has sprung up around this. There are school lunch pizza manufacturers, who bring together wheat and cheese (which are themselves kept cheap from farm subsidies) and create a bare bones, extremely low quality. This product has next to no redeeming factors, and would not be profitable on the open market. But because of this loophole, they can underbid companies with more expensive ingredients (such as actual vegetables) and receive a healthy cut of the funding spent on school lunches. Basically, what we are talking about is federally subsidized bad pizza manufacturers.
I can’t find hard numbers, but it seems that around 30% of school lunches are contracted out to private companies. They must also be maximizing profit on this low-cost product. Don’t schools have to choose the contractor that provides the lowest bid? It may even be legally impossible for these companies to provide better food while this loophole exists.
Someone would like to close this loophole, and require that pizzas have a meaningful amount of vegetable ingredients if they are going to count as fulfilling the vegetable requirement. In practice, this would end being able to substitute pizza for vegetables, since pizza isn’t actually a great way to get a serving of veggies.
Some forces oppose this, such as the sub-par pizza manufacturers, who have no interest in creating a competitive product, and who got really used to being able to exchange a shoddy product for a nice stream of federal funds.
Yip, and that’s because of the “evil” federal intervention in what states are allowed to do. If anything, that’s worse than telling schools what lunches the feds are willing to pay for. Freedom of religion stretches to everyone.
Nope. It’s because it’s in the constitution. I didn’t see anything about tomato paste in that document. If the SCOTUS finds that somewhere, then so be it. Until then, you just threw out a bad analogy.
So, I noticed you didn’t respond to the several explanatory responses to your confusion behind the change from 2 tbsp of tomato paste = one vegetable serving to 8 tbsp of tomato paste = one vegetable serving. Get it now?