EDITORIAL: Congress values savings over children’s health
A congressional spending bill was approved this week with an attached rider that would ultimately undermine the school lunch standards the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed earlier this year.
The USDA had proposed limiting the use of potatoes, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The bill would block or delay all of those efforts.
What has people most outraged is that under the proposal, tomato paste, popular in school lunches as pizza sauce, would become a vegetable. Currently, if two tablespoons of tomato sauce is on a slice of pizza, it qualifies as a serving of vegetables.
In its recommendation, the USDA had wanted to up the vegetable standard to at least a half-cup of pizza sauce.
But lobbyists from the American Frozen Food Institute convinced members of the House Appropriations Committee to strike out that half-cup rule and other school lunch regulations, such as the restrictions on sodium and servings of starchy vegetables.
Nutritionists agree the whole effort to validate pizza sauce as a vegetable is similar to the Reagan administration’s efforts in the ‘80s to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs.
And now in 2011, that is what the whole thing is about — saving money. The USDA estimates all of the nutritional changes originally proposed would increase the cost of each lunch by about 14 cents.
With austerity measures already stripping public institutions of needed funding, lobbyists have found a way to take advantage of reduced funds in order to pursue their financial agenda. Their gains however, come at a steep cost to public health.
According to The Center for Disease Control, 33.8 percent of U.S. citizens are obese, and approximately 17 percent (or 12.5 million) of American children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 years old are obese.
“We are not saying pizza is a vegetable,” said Corey Henry, the spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute, which supports the bill. “What we are saying is if you serve a slice of pizza with 2 tablespoons of vegetable paste, it can be an important way to deliver a number of vegetables that children will actually consume.”
They are actually saying that the legislation they managed to buy is going to keep frozen pizzas going into children’s bodies for a long time. Subsidized school lunches make up a substantial portion of low-income students’ daily meals and taxpayer dollars should go toward providing healthy meals for those least likely to receive them at home.
When it comes to accounting for nutrition, pepperoni pizza will count for every category of the ridiculous food pyramid it represents. Cash-strapped schools will be able to justify feeding junk food to students in lieu of vegetables, and factory farms and frozen food conglomerates will pocket more public money.
Sacrificing children’s health for industry interests is just a bit too much to stomach.
