The War on Pizza

Listen to Dave Ross Commentary: The War on Pizza

It turns out there’s another threat to our children besides middle-aged shower buddies.

The threat of pizza masquerading as a vegetable. Schools want to define pizza as a vegetable because then they can get the federal government to subsidize it. But an anti-obesity group called Mission: Readiness says this little game has made kids so fat it’s literally endangering America’s military readiness.

“If schools want to count pizza as a vegetable, they should make a pizza that meets the vegetable standards.”

They were pushing a rule that for pizza to count as a vegetable each slice would have to include a QUARTER CUP of tomato paste. Which of course would put children into tomato shock. And probably drain the nation’s strategic tomato paste reserve.

But yesterday, Congress rejected the new rule and decided a mere two tablespoons of runny tomatoes are sufficient to baptize pizza as a vegetable.

And some nutritionists are cool with that:

“We can give kids tofu and escarole, but they don’t have to eat it. It’s not nutrition until kids eat it,” says one nutritionist.

Ah, escarole: a key ingredient in those delicious yard waste salads.

But the bigger question here is why is the government still involved in this? I thought the purpose of school lunch subsidies was to keep the kids from starving. Well now the kids are obese. I’d say mission accomplished.

If this is really about military readiness, make them walk to school and do a chin up once in a while.

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