Who needs leafy greens and carrots when pizza and french fries will do?
Congress wants pizza and french fries to stay on school lunch lines and is fighting the Obama administration's efforts to take unhealthy foods out of schools.
The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.
The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now.
SDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.
Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administration's much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.
School meals that are subsidized by the federal government must include a certain amount of vegetables, and USDA's proposal could have pushed pizza-makers and potato growers out of the school lunch business.
Piling on to the companies' opposition, some conservatives argue that the federal government shouldn't tell children what to eat. In a summary of the bill, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would "prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and ...provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz1e4kVNHeg
Taken from Fox news (lol) but what do you guys think?
I know in my old high school, pizza was always an option, but about halfway through senior year they split it so that you can't get pizza and fries at the same time. The amount of protests the students put up was actually admirable (I usually brought my lunch so it wasn't quite applicable to me) but they weren't able to overturn the decision. The students had originally thought it was the school's decision, but it was just that my high school was the first around the area to start making unhealthy options void due to the new nutrition guidelines.
The problem is, the education budget keeps getting cut more and more, and without that money there is not only a lower output of student performance due to classroom dynamics, but the money to purchase quality, actually "healthy" food for school lunches isn't really there. The kids will still be eating highly processed crap and still really gaining the same weight even if they were eating pizza and french fries together all the time. For some reason, I keep seeing the future generation as a bunch of obese, idiotic American retards :< basically our stereotype, no? However, I do like the fact they're trying to advocate for more whole grains, because from what I recall, pretty much any bread product in school lunches was white bread. Yuck.
