A Congressional spending bill released on Monday would allow schools to define pizza as a vegetable under Department of Agriculture regulations. This is long overdue recognition that in the Age of Pizza, pizza is a vegetable.

Pizza is a vegetable in the same way pea pods and squash are vegetables. Pizza grows on thick green stalks that come from tiny pizza seeds (under a magnifying glass they look like tiny pies). It grows in vast fields, the dough rising from the baking earth. Other varieties droop from oregano-scented vines, green tendrils curling between the layers of sauce and cheese.

If the ancient Hebrews were forced to classify manna under bureaucratic regulations, they would have called it a vegetable too. It was life-giving sustenance and therefore, vegetative to the core. If pizza is not a vegetable, then where does all this stuff come from?

 The Associated Press reports:

Food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes, and some conservatives in Congress say the federal government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat. 

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and to provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals.”

It’s nice that food companies stand for freedom and children’s rights. It would be even nicer if these Republicans would get the federal government off the back of schools entirely. But no matter what the government does on this particular issue,  pizza will find its way into lunchbags and school cafeterias. It will rise from the earth, tilled by pizza farmers, and fall from the skies, like the manna of the ancient world.

J. Devoy at The Legal Satyricon writes that there is both a positive and negative side to this pizza plenty: 

In America’s twilight, it has entered a phase described by The Thinking Housewife as The Age of Pizza. This sounds delightful, if you’re eight years old. For adults and everyone else, though, it is a living hell from which pizza cannot be escaped. At family gatherings, office functions, law school events, and any meeting where undergraduates are present, there is pizza. Even within politics pizza is inescapable, as it is precisely where THE Herman Cain made his fortune. Pizza has become the default nourishment for the dead-eyed soul.

There is, however, one redeeming point to the ubiquity of pizza. It is the gift of the Baby Boom generation’s cynical desire to put pizza on anything – pizza chips, bagels, hot pockets – and make it available morning, noon and night, for a profit. Baby Boomers can lift high the pie of sloppy sauce and refute the allegation that they never gave anything valuable to subsequent generations. Sure, your student loans may carry interest in excess of 7%, and all of the jobs you went to college – at the Boomers’ urging – to obtain may have evaporated so the Boomers’ quarterly earnings could have been a few points higher; but dammit, they gave you pizza in the schools, and everywhere else, at the expense of all other choices.

                                                — Comments —

Lydia Sherman writes:

There is hope. Students already hate the school pizza, and often use it in food fights. They won’t be anxious to eat it as adults.

Laura writes:

Perhaps. Maybe it’s hard to like pizza again once you’ve used it as weaponry.

Jeff W. writes:

Your post reminds me of another potential vegetable.

When my children were young, I used to enjoy telling them about the Velcro farmers. Some of those farmers grow hooks and some of them grow loops. They comb the seeds out of the Velcro using a Velcro gin, and then they put the loops and hooks together before they bring the Velcro to market. I told them I might someday take them to the Velcro harvest festival. (Unlike other people, I do not claim to be a good parent.)

I do not know if Velcro is a vegetable, however. The question of whether it is a fruit or a vegetable, up until now, has never entered my mind.

Laura writes:

It would be nice if we could find some organic Velcro in the stores.

Diana writes:

Pizza may or may not be a vegetable, but the Congressmen who sponsored the bill certainly are vegetables.

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