Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Limits on starchy vegetables to two servings a week. As I noted recently, the Senate passed an amendment to the USDA's appropriations bill to block any restrictions on potatoes. Most observers think this means that unlimited potatoes will stay in the school meals. As a result of attending a conference sponsored by Crop Life America it was disclosed that there is a decision by the Supreme Court which places the Department of Agriculture-OMB position in a considerably more favorable light.
In particular in Nix v. Hedden , U. A witness to the Agriculture-OMB deliberations writes:. Government decision-making is a human endeavor, which means policy can be decided on criteria very different from abstract logic.
Even some fancier restaurants plant bottles of it on each table because people ask for it anyway. Heinz, the platonic ideal of ketchup, according to Malcolm Gladwell , dominates because it is the perfect balance of sweet, salty, sour, and umami, a precisely calibrated product that is difficult to replicate.
Food manufacturers only had to list the ingredients in order of volume, so we do not know the specific amount or proportion of sugar, for example, in each bottle, only that cane sugar was the third most prevalent ingredient after tomatoes and spices.
Food manufacturers were not required to list specific nutrition information until the labeling law. Heinz along with other ketchup makers began substituting high-fructose corn syrup HFCS for sugar in the s. A small irony of Ketchup as a Vegetable is that tomatoes are classified botanically as a fruit, not a vegetable.
This is why tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, and peppers are all sold as vegetables, even though according to their botanical properties they are fruit Nix v. Hedden Not everyone, however, regards tomatoes as a vegetable. Studies show that people categorize tomatoes as fruit or vegetable largely depending on their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, which influences how and whether they commonly prepare and consume them Thompson et al.
Because of its texture and thickness? Because ketchup contains sugar and salt that compromise its nutritional value? Because it is commonly consumed as an accoutrement to food and not considered a food item itself?
Ketchup is indeed a condiment, thickly textured with a concentrated flavor that functions as an accent to other foods. As a condiment, it conflicts with our idea of what a vegetable as a component of a meal is supposed to be. This is so with regard to texture, concentration of flavor, the manner in which a vegetable is consumed, the usual quantity consumed at one sitting, and the nutrition we expect from it. Usually the condiment flavor is too concentrated to function as a side vegetable alone Douglas ; see also Mintz and Schlettwein-Gsell We are not comfortable with, for example, ordering a plate of just a condiment, say ketchup or mustard, at a restaurant—that would defy standard notions of a meal as well as the understood function of a condiment.
Tomatoes are also nutritionally beneficial, but similarly, 77 percent of the tomatoes Americans consume are processed into sauce or ketchup, both of which are most often prepared with added salt and sugar. USDA data indicates that 90 percent of Americans are not consuming an adequate number of vegetables daily, and half of what vegetables they do consume are potatoes and tomatoes, mostly in the form of French fries, chips, and ketchup Ferdman In America ketchup was predominantly identified as a ubiquitous and much-loved condiment, an accompaniment to nationally recognized and familiar foods especially loved by children, but not a stand-alone vegetable.
The thought of feeding children, especially low-income children, ketchup as a vegetable even if this was not the direct intention or outcome of the proposal was read as a bizarre punitive act straight out of a Dickens novel and thus damning to the Reagan administration.
This substitution seems logical and nutritionally sound. It is logical, however, to wonder why the outcry was so focused on ketchup as a vegetable when there were so many other sins to be singled out in the school lunch recommendations. Yet the meat substitutes got only minimal comment from nutrition and child advocacy groups or the popular press. While it is impossible to prove a counterfactual, it may be in part because the trend of reducing protein portions and employing synthetic substitutes had been occurring over the past decade, as the above discussion indicates.
The public may not have loved the concept of a combined patty of soy and beef, but was more familiar with it and thus perhaps more inured to the idea, especially as compared with counting ketchup as a vegetable. Moreover, that school lunch was largely consumed by lower-income children, including children of color, no doubt made it easier to downplay the consequences of the budget cuts that reduced the amount of beef. Similarly, other recommendations issued at the same time—cookies and pie for breakfast, replacing low-fat milk with whole milk just as childhood obesity levels were beginning to climb—in retrospect seem at least as bad if not worse than tomato paste counting as a vegetable.
The proposal to count cookies and donuts as bread portions seems the most egregious recommendation, yet it received minimal attention at the time. This is perhaps because in the early s Americans had not yet experienced the sharp increases in sugar intake through growing soda consumption, and the accompanying obesity rates and subsequent health problems that were realized in the s.
Also, of course, the spotlight was squarely turned on Ketchup as a Vegetable , against which everything else fell into the background. It is interesting to analyze the entire set of recommendations with almost forty years of perspective. Today, the meat substitutes outlined in the school lunch proposals make a great deal of sense and were in fact approved in the s nuts and nut butters, and tofu. There are further interesting postscripts to this story.
First, in , seventeen years after the ketchup incident, salsa, by all accounts a more nutritious condiment but a condiment nevertheless, was approved as a vegetable for school lunch. Government officials, understandably nervous about the announcement, were defensive in their statements on the subject.
Frozen pizza makers, who supply school districts with millions of pizzas per year, balked at the thought, since the increased amount would exclude their product from meeting the new nutrition standards. Pizza lobbyists won Nestle School lunch is still a fraught political and economic battleground for government, nutrition advocates, and food product manufacturers, as the past decade has witnessed.
In the Trump administration sought to roll back the improved nutrition and food requirements implemented in the Obama-era Healthy Hunger-free Kids Act of , legislation which had updated and improved nutritional requirements for school lunches. Filed under: Politics Food. By Cecil Adams Jul 16, Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Dear Cecil: The phrase "ketchup is a vegetable" is coming up a lot in discussions of President Reagan's recent demise.
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