Congress has taken on a long-neglected injustice in the food pyramid and will push to ensure that pizza, once derided as little more than a triangular delivery system for sodium and saturated fats, be finally recognized as the wholesome vegetable that it is. Our tax dollars, God’s work.
On Monday, Republican-controlled House of Representatives introduced a spending bill — a measure far more significant than their initial whining and foot-stomping — that would obviate a proposal made earlier this year by the Agriculture Department to limit the amount of potatoes and sodium, as well as increase the number of whole grains, served in school cafeterias. Unsurprisingly, changes to the Agriculture’s proposal had been requested by frozen pizza companies and the salt and potato industries, which worry that, deprived of essential french fry nutrients, American children will begin to absorb too much water and explode like Senator Kelly from the first X-Men movie. Some conservative congressional members have also expressed concerns that the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat, especially if they’re eating frozen pizza and French fries, and so have crafted a bill that, according to CBS, would “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and…provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals.” The bill includes language qualifying that the gross tomato paste used in school pizzas be considered a vegetable; once classified as a vegetable, the paste would count towards fulfilling the vegetable portion of nutritional guidelines.