Pizza is a Vegetable, a jaunty ditty about Congressional scientific illiteracy

Attentive readers will recall Congress's reclassification of pizza as a vegetable for the purpose of mandated healthy school lunches. Jonathan Mann's composed a jaunty ditty to correct the record.

Pizza Is A Vegetable (1056) (Thanks, Jonathan!)

• [benher]

  I hope this is the last song ever last one of those rat bastard senators hears when their number is finally up.

• [AncientScot]

  The Congressionally- Approved side dish for the turkey.

• [pjk]

  See now that just made me crave pizza.

• [NoOneSpecific]

  This is beyond stupidity. So a pepperoni pizza slive is a VEGETABLE? No, the guys making that ruling are vegetables.

  Topping aside, the main part of pizza is bread so when you consider all the cheese you are seriously looking at a huge CARB source. Carb/Protein when you add the ‘meat’.

• [Mace Moneta]

  My wife makes a great vegan pizza, so it certainly can be a vegetable.

• [kaidaigoji]

  Why won’t this myth die? Probably confirmation bias because we hate congress.  So, let’s lay out the facts:

  1) Congress did not “redefine” anything – they kept the nutrition standards the same, rather than implement new ones from the Dept. of Ag.

  2) the bill doesn’t mention “pizza” anywhere – what it does do is continue to count an eighth of a cup of tomato paste as a serving as vegetables.

  3) an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is not completely unreasonable for a serving of vegetables – it’s more concentrated, and contains similar nutrients to, say, a half a cup of apples.

  Wonkblog did all the heavy lifting on this one: check it out http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/did-congress-declare-pizza-as-a-vegetable-not-exactly/2011/11/20/gIQABXgmhN_blog.html

  • [DildOverlord.exe]

    You can’t expect people to actually read about what they’re criticizing, can you?

  • [nox]

    This is not the first time BoingBoing/Cory have pushed misinformation and myths before. The first time I was disappointed in both of them, as I held them in high regard.

• [John Harland]

  It’s true what they say.

  A lot of the time, facts just aren’t funny.

  • [Jonathan Mann]

    This is my feeling as well. I read the WaPo article and decided I’d write the song anyway. For one thing, it’s a funny idea. For another, I still feel like the spirit of the thing holds true, i.e. school lunches are unbelievably unhealthy due to the over-arching influence of corporate lobby in congress. But that sentence doesn’t fit as well into a song. :-)

    • [purple-stater]

      So, to wrap it all up, you figured that it was just fine to further promote disinformation and unfounded ridicule, because it was funny?

      Fair enough.

      I’ve had a look at my children’s public school lunches. They seem to have a variety of healthy choices, greatly exceeding the school lunches I grew up with. Yes, given their own free reign at choosing ,they’re going to do what most adults do; choose what they like to eat, not what is the healthiest. Kids don’t much care for salads.

      Politicians set the limits of what is allowed, the individual school administrators are the ones that choose what to actually buy and serve. If the school has a better budget, the kids get better food. But one thing that schools do know for sure; it doesn’t matter how healthy it is, if kids don’t like it, then they won’t eat it anyway.

• [Oliver Schmieding]

  nah, you’re probably right.
  in the country where the quadruple or quintuple blissburger was invented,

  about 20 ml of processed pulp from overripe, semi-rotten tomatoes with a lot of residue from all that glorious antibiotic/antibacterial/antiwhatever greenhouise treatments still incorporated , stripped (or is it ‘peeled’?) by applying gratuitious amounts af ammonia,  surely must count as “vegetable”. nobody in their right mind (that is, the rest of the world) would buy this stuff to use it as food anyway, after all…)

  *heh*

• [ocker3]

  I think the concern is, that with that one serving of vegetable goodness, comes a Lot of cheese, dough, and meat, in a system that’s notorious for cutting costs and using low-cost products. It’s Hard to cut costs when it comes to food and not loose nutritional value.

• [Steve Miller]

  Redefining anything or not is irrelevant, congress remains a vegetable. Pull the plug!

• [MarcVader]

  Vegetable all the things!

• [Ludovic Pessot]

  About the video, potatoes are not a vegetable (they’re 100% starch) and are not recognized as such by the NHS.