What are your reactions to the ~ November 15, 2011, law that Congress declared pizza a health food?

Pizza has nutritious ingredients. It’s just that the nutrients:calories ratio is not so good i.e. don’t eat too much of it over time.

There is Pizza, and then there is “pizza”. Just as there is tomato sauce and “tomato sauce”.
For example, for a classic Pizza Margherita, the dough is just flour, water, yeast, salt. like bread. the sauce is just crushed tomatoes, a pinch of salt, and some basil, and you only use a small amount to coat the pizza. Mozarella is a lower fat cheese. The end result is something that you can call healthy.
Which is of course very different from industrialised “pizza”, which is loaded with salt, fat, sugar, and whatnot.
When you pile up your sugar filled pizza base with basically ketchup, tons of meat, fatty cheese, and more cheese, then the result is no longer healthy.

I very much doubt school lunches serve real pizza. They are going for the frozen junk pizza, because it is cheap and convenient.

This sounded too stupid to let pass, so here’s what I found: Technically, Congress didn’t declare pizza itself a health food, but it did classify tomato paste on pizza as a vegetable for school lunch purposes.

@ragingloli Is pizza a health food on your planet?

Pizza can be decently healthy if you make it yourself. Fresh ingredients, using items low in salt, vegetable toppings, etc. I know because I have diabetes and high blood pressure but I still worked out how to have pizza every once in awhile.

I think it is a perfect example of our government being dysfunctional. They can’t attack the big things but focus on things like this?

@seawulf575 – they were trying to weasel out of some nutritional requirements without spending any money.

There are hundreds of millions of variations on how you could make pizza – 25 different toppings in various combinations.

25! = 15511210043330985984000000 (factorial means multiplying the combinations)

Some of them are not nutritious. Some are wonderfully so.

I’ve never thought it was unhealthy.

This was merely an extension of Reagan’s determination of ketchup as a vegetable. The GOP is obsessed with crushed tomatoes.

GOP is obsessed with shortchanging public school kids. Ketchup and tomato sauce are cheaper than fresh vegetables.