The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

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Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
@TheChrony
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Write for Us
Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
@TheChrony
Print Issues

Dear Congress, Pizza Is Not a Vegetable

Here’s the thing about pizza. Even in the best-case scenario, it cannot meet the requirements for vegetable intake. Even with one “healthy” ingredient, it simply has too many other ingredients for it to be considered healthy.

Pizza was never meant to be healthy, as indicated by the cheese and toppings that are an integral part of every good pizza. This is the food that anybody on a diet, trying to avoid a heart attack or just trying to keep healthy in general avoids for good reason. Pizza has a high concentration of fat, sodium and carbohydrates, all of which can be unhealthy. Making pizza healthy would destroy a trait that is inherent to pizza. The result would be far from pizza.

School lunch pizza belongs to a completely different category. In addition to being inherently unhealthy, I would hesitate to label it as food. It’s more like cardboard covered in something that looks like cheese — but is really plastic. This so-called food tests the limits of what we define as edible by using day-old, extremely low quality ingredients that are just as likely to give you indigestion as they are to fill you up. Yet Congress has determined that pizza contains enough healthy ingredients to fulfill the daily vegetable quota for schoolchildren.

In addition to being completely illogical, they applied this term to school lunch pizza and said that pizza only needed to contain two tablespoons of tomato paste to meet the requirement for vegetable intake. This slippery slope will lead to desperate school districts infusing things that are clearly not vegetables with two tablespoons of vegetable paste in an effort to have more balanced meals. Next thing you know, schools will be serving vegetable-infused éclairs, vegetable-infused hot dogs and vegetable-infused burgers. Considering that the taste has already hit rock bottom, what’s the worst that can happen? On second thought, I am sure I will eat my words in a few weeks.

While they are at it, Congress might as well declare Axe Body Spray a soup, Trump our president and soccer the national sport.

The thing is, some school budgets are relatively small with most of the money devoted to education instead of lunch food. As a result they rarely focus on procuring the freshest ingredients for the food they create. Instead, they focus on producing or buying the most food for the cheapest price. If Congress was really concerned with the health of students, they would pass legislation that actually helped, like increasing school budgets or actually putting vegetables on the menu.

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