Floor Speeches

Mr. Speaker, I have to voice my opposition to an insidious provision that has been added to this bill at the last minute by agribusiness and the frozen food industry, and that is a change that allows pizza to be counted as a vegetable. They started with French fries; now they've moved on to pizza. This language equates pizza with vegetables and weakens otherwise good school nutrition standards.

This false equivalency harkens back to the ludicrous labeling of ketchup as a vegetable made infamous 30 years ago by President Ronald Reagan. Again, this bill's actual language requires crediting of tomato paste--again, crediting of tomato paste from page 90 of this bill--as a vegetable under the school lunch program to be subsidized by taxpayers as a vegetable.

I had a family from my district, from Eagle County, Colorado, in my office earlier this morning and I asked the mom, I said, When your kid is eating, do you count pizza as his vegetable? And she said, No. And parents across the Nation agree.

Pizza can be incorporated into a healthy diet. I eat pizza. Most of my constituents eat pizza. But when we're talking about taxpayer subsidies for healthy vegetables, to make sure that they're available for kids on the side of pizza, making sure there's some broccoli, making sure there's some spinach, making sure there's something healthy for them to eat at the school lunch counter, pizza alone--particularly pizza with no vegetables on it, just tomato paste--it's common sense that it's not a vegetable. What's next? Are Twinkies going to be considered a vegetable?

Rather than having a deliberative effort, we have special interests inserting these provisions into these bills, contrary to the public health. And we wonder why Congress is so unpopular nationally. No one can help but to look at us and scratch their heads when we say that french fries count as a healthy, nutritious vegetable, that pizza counts as a healthy, nutritional element.

You know, poor children's health is something we all have a stake in. Not only are the kids and the families affected, but we're all affected. The costs of Medicaid and Medicare, government spending, rising obesity rates. The empty calories in french fries are not equal to truly nutritious vegetables like carrots, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers.

I know it's hard to get kids to eat vegetables. I have a 9-week-old. He hasn't been weaned yet, so we haven't had to deal with that yet. But you know what? You don't define vegetables down. You don't call a Twinkie a vegetable. You don't call pizza a vegetable. What you do is you have to make sure that kids know how to incorporate healthy food into their diet so they can grow up strong and keep all of our costs down and make sure to keep America healthy.

Mr. Speaker, this bill has many important provisions, but I feel it's critical to highlight the ludicrous definition that Congress is giving by redefining nutrition down and providing taxpayer subsidies for unhealthy food in our schools.