courtesy of JamieOliver.com

If you thought the whole “ketchup is a vegetable when it comes to school lunches” idea was a joke back in the eighties, here’s a new nutrition laugh for 2011: tomato paste.

NPR reports U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition standards call for half a cup of the red sauce to equal a serving of veggies if it’s slathered on a slice of pizza in the cafeteria.

Mama mia!

“A slice of pizza would literally be swimming in tomato paste,” Corey Henry, who works for the American Frozen Food Institute, which wants Congress to change the guideline, tells the news organization. “No kid at school is going to eat a piece of pizza that’s just drenched in tomato paste.”

And it looks like food industry lobbying to keep pizza in the veggie category may have worked. NPR reports the House of Representatives’ new agriculture appropriations bill, expected to be approved this week, would keep stricter nutrition guidelines from being enforced, including limiting french fries.

“This [nutrition regulation proposed by Congress] may go down as the biggest nutritional blunder since Reagan tried to declare ketchup as a vegetable,” Margo Wootan, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, tells NPR. “It’s ridiculous to call pizza a vegetable.”

If pizza is a vegetable, does that mean Jell-O counts as a fruit? Hmm … If only we could have convinced our parents of that when we were in school …

Here are some pizzas that we don’t consider vegetables, but that are packed with veggies. Give these a spin:

• Deep-Dish Vegetable Pizza

• Roasted Vegetable Pizza

• Sweet Pepper, Corn, and Turkey Pizza

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Herman Cain “Imagine There’s No Pizza” Video

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Categories: Food News | Tags: Pizza, Vegetables
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