What's an obesity epidemic? OR: How pizza became a vegetable.
 

FFFFFFFFFF-

Burn it all down. We're done here.

I mean, the Republicans supporting this are turning into Captain Planet villains, if they weren't already.

Just.... how could you possibly think getting in the way of healthier lunches for students is a bad thing?

EDIT: For the sake of clarification, it's less that pizza is being defined as a vegetable, but rather that congress is allowing schools to say they've filled their vegetable quota by serving pizza, even though the amount of "vegetable" on it is negligible. It also allows schools to keep serving kids shitty french fries every day, thus filling their vegetable quote with yet another unhealthy food.

You'd think I'm taking it out of context, but I'm not!

As for how one could possibly think healthier lunches are a bad thing, there are several approaches. One is that healthy food is more expensive. If you want to cut government funds even further from where it is (damn, greedy teachers), cheap food is a way to do that.* Another is that you happen to be selling those cheap, crappy lunches as I have illustrated above or you are funded by those selling cheap, crappy lunches as Congress illustrated by supporting this bill. A third way one could think this is a good idea is the fallacious support of children's right to choose what they eat. Because children don't already have a separate legal existence from adults, limiting their rights and liabilities because they're freaking children and need to be taken care of by adults, including feeding them healthy food.

In a nutshell, healthier lunches are bad if you, yourself, value money more than chidren's welfare.

*Fun note: I went to usgovernmentspending.com to see what the exact percentage of the national budget went to education, and it was 15%, the same as "defense." Puzzled, I clicked to see what it was when state funding was excluded. 4% of the federal budget. So, yeah.

The next Democratic First Lady should launch a "don't shoot yourself in the fucking face" initiative, educating our nation's young people about the deleterious health effects of shooting yourself in the face.

For a while I've figured that the Captain Planet villains were all so "unrealistic" because Ted Turner just based them off of, like, personal acquaintances.

This is just stupid.

Though, also, pasta == unhealthy is also stupid.

It's not intrinsically bad for you, no. But, given that it's made typically of enriched (read:bleached of all nutrients) flour, it's not terribly good for you, either. But, I mean, the same could be said of store-bought bread. I just don't like to think about it.

You can buy whole grain pasta/unbleached pasta, these days. It tastes a little different, but it's generally what I get.

And it costs a little more, and we're talking about schools which are being forced to cut costs even more, so...

These types of things are why I opted to bring my own lunch to school everyday. Except taco day... which was only once a month and on Thursdays. Kind of makes me believe people just don't think anymore. Scratch that, they DO think, just not long enough for a coherent or reasonable thought.

am I the only one that thinks a small meal you have for five days a week, for 3/4 of the year, probably isn't a very significant factor in your over all diet? Yea we shouldn't be serving deep fried twinkies, but micromanaging school lunches seems abit silly.

That seems to answer the question right there.