Good news, everyone. I'm personally going to celebrate at Dairy Queen with a nutritious Treatzza Vegetable.

I'm just going to leave this here regarding that pizza as a vegetable debate.

While I suppose bottled water isn't any better at preventing dehydration than any other type of drinking water, and I suppose you could get away with never drinking water ever if you're hooked up to an IV... isn't this sort of beyond absurd? I mean, are the Boy Scouts going to have to rewrite their field manuals in Britain because water can't prevent dehydration anymore? It's almost like the EFSA is trolling the rest of Europe on purpose.

If "pizza is a vegetable" then I am the Pope

Is there enough tomato in that particular tomato paste/puree to count as a unit, or whatever, of fruit? I’m sure some tomato pastes do have some nutritional value to them but even given that would enough be spread over that slice of pizza? Screw the paste, just top all the pizzas with a good portion of vegetables/fruit and be done with it. I like peppers and red onion on pizza.

The idea behind this legislation (at least in the beginning) was to make sure kids get a proper meal in schools. So even if the pizza is made with the best organic tomatoes in all of America, it is still not a healthy meal for children.

Unhealthy food in schools is a very serious topic, as it lays the foundation for a multitude of later health problems. This british cook (Jamie something, I'm to lazy to look it up) is putting a lot of effort into making school food healthier and I've read some interesting interviews with him about this.

Banana isn't a fruit either, but a herb.

I think those classifications are based on the "nutritional classification" and not the botanical. Heck, if the German language is anything to go by, half of our plants are named wrong.

Of course they are, but with you guys bogarting the umlauts there's no way there'd be enough to go around.

This article is a good reminder of why I hate reading news articles. Just give me facts. I hate reading things that look like a patchwork quilt. I didn't see anywhere in the article where it said that "pizza is a vegetable." I did read that the tomato paste on the pizza can count as a vegetable, but that's something different. But I didn't finish the article because it jumped around so much either.

In my opinion, pizza is a pretty well balanced meal: dairy, bread, fruit/vegetable, and meat. (Depending on what you put on it). I see absolutely nothing "junk food" about it, any more than eating buttered escargot as an appetizer before a nice filet mignon and salad or having a piece of bread, salami, cheese, and cucumber salad. Granted, as with everything, you should balance and moderate yourself.

Now, if they want to have healthier meals, you can keep the menu the same, but stop using frozen foods loaded with preservatives, etc and hire people to actually cook meals rather than heat them up. Look! I made jobs! :) (Though I destroyed the "frozen food warmer-upper" jobs in the process... sorry)

If I thought I could stand eating so much celery, I would gorge myself on it until I was obese just to prove a point. Or maybe I would find that you cannot become obese eating loads of celery and actually lose weight and prove myself wrong in the process. Either way I would win (and hate celery with a passion).

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Wow, this somehow became what I think is the longest post I've ever made on here. It's like I'm passionate about the subject or something, but really I'm not. A bit of this is might be considered reductio ad absurdum or whatnot or not at all... oh well... disregard.

I'm very tempted to make a dirty joke involving Tomato sauce and...other "things" but since I respect this community - I will not

What's next.

The cheese on the pizza will replace our milk?

You are correct. However, let's cut the hypocrisy : you are smart enough to realize that by announcing it the way they do, they clearly promote the pizza and the unhealthy food in general. The greasy kind of pizza, that is, that we find in most (if not every single) high school, here in Minnesota (among other gourmet food such as fried chicken, French fries, cheese nuggets, mozzarella sticks etc...).

The pizza that you describe as "balanced meal" is full of fat, "hidden" fat. The (tasteless) bread is full of crap, the lunch meat is full of crap etc... Just because you have meat and a couple of mushrooms as a topping doesn't make it a "balanced meal".

Your example reminds of what I see around here, overweight people who think that they have a good diet because they eat soup and salad. If only it was a real veggie soup, or a nice salad-vinaigrette, instead of having a 4k calories soup full of preservatives and a lettuce buried under toppings and gooey ranch dressing.

Don't get me wrong though, I like fried chicken, American pizza and 4k soup. But if you consider those as balanced meals, then you have a problem.

Who cares what anybody calls anything?

It is one meal a day, perhaps one day a week, and one always has the option of sending a child to school with a lunch if they don't like it.

How many food nazis, thought nazis, lifestyle nazis , do we need before someone just picks up a shutzstaffel's, oberfuhrer's hat to do away with them?

It is up to the individual who decides, and so it always has been in a free society.

I personally get tired of all of these 'experts' shoving things down the people's throats. They clamor for socialism, but then cry and want to exert some control when they think someone else's freedom will impact their capitalistic wallets.

Sorry for the rant, buy freedom rules in my book, and everyone should do as they always have: mind their own business!

Edit to add: It is not only in these little things, but transcends borders and cultures as well. The 'know it alls', want to exert influence in everything, everywhere, and should just stfu!