Pizza, the action

Never mind all that supercommittee budget-reduction nonsense; let's talk about something really important. No, just to stop the myth before it becomes firmly entrenched, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable:

This is not a fight over pizza. It is, instead, a fight about tomato paste. Specifically, it's a fight about how much of the product counts as one serving of vegetables.

Right now, tomato paste gets a sort of special treatment under school lunch regulations. Just “an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables,” my colleague Dina ElBoghdady explained last week.

The Obama administration guidelines, outlined in January, would have nixed tomato paste's extra credit, counting a half cup as a half cup. “Under this proposal, schools would credit tomato paste and puree based on actual volume as served,” the regulation, published in the Federal Register on Jan. 13, 2011, explains. “Schools would not be allowed to credit a volume of fruits or vegetables that is more than the actual serving size.”

What happened this week was that Congress blocked that change: Tomato paste will continue to get outsized credit, with one-eighth of a cup essentially counted as something four times larger.

Measuring by volume doesn't make much sense if you're trying to control for nutritional value. Identical serving sizes of various foods will have different amounts of various nutrients. The relevant question is how an eighth of a cup of tomato sauce compares with half a cup of various fruits and vegetables:

If you stack one-eighth of a cup of tomato paste up against a half-cup of some pretty common fruits and vegetables, the paste actually doesn't do so badly.

Besides, everybody knows pizza could never be classified as something as mundane as a mere vegetable. Pizza is the magic food. Even stuff I ordinarily don't care for, such as olives, tastes wonderful on a pizza. Now, if parents are looking for a way to get their kids to eat more veggies . . .

You all may now return to debating the metaphysics of Santa Claus. Leave some pizza out for him this year, by the way, instead of milk and cookies. Your haul of presents might just improve.