USA Today Editorial
When Mom told you to eat your vegetables, she wasn’t thinking about pizza and french fries. She probably meant broccoli, carrots and that old standby, spinach.
But Mom clearly had more common sense than members of Congress, and their friends in the frozen food industry, who this month beat back efforts to make school lunches more nutritious. The story is a particularly unappetizing microcosm of how Washington works.
The tale begins 20 years ago, when putting 2 tablespoons of tomato paste on a slice of pizza allowed the slice to count as a vegetable in the federally funded school lunch program. (Forget, for a moment, the technicality that tomatoes are a fruit.) This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture moved to change that little absurdity and other outdated guidelines in response to a congressional directive to improve school lunches.
