In England this week, parliament and public health groups are meeting to discuss how to reduce childhood obesity in Great Britain. Proposals are wide and varied, and range from taxing sugar to changing school diets and encouraging exercise. What is crucial in all of the discussions though, is encouraging the consumption of healthier foods, particularly fruits and vegetables.
The United States already used a novel technique to increase the amounts of fruits and vegetables consumed by children. The U.S. government classified pizza as an official vegetable, making all of the pizza consumed by youngsters to count in the amount of vegetables eaten.
The decision of the U.S. government follows impeccable logic. It would be difficult, and rather annoying, for the government to actually try to change children’s eating behavior. By simply declaring the foods that children already eat to be vegetables, the amount of vegetables consumed by children vastly increases.
The UK should definitely take note of the American example in their upcoming debates.
However, while classifying pizza as a vegetable is a wise policy idea, it is based on rather faulty logic, as pizza is clearly a fruit. The sauce on a pizza is made of tomatoes, which is why the U.S. government classified pizza as a vegetable in the first place. A tomato is not a vegetable, though. It grows above ground, it has seeds, it is juicy, and is usually red. All these characteristics firmly establish tomatoes as fruit. Any product derived from tomatoes—be it ketchup, pizza, whatever other products have tomatoes in them—are thus considered fruit. How the U.S. government got this fundamental fact wrong testifies to the institutional degradation of America and the lack of effective American policy making.
The U.S. classification of pizza as a vegetable doesn’t go far enough. Pizza sauce is essentially similar to ketchup, so why isn’t ketchup similarly classified? Ketchup should be classified as a fruit. Any meal that includes ketchup would thus have a serving of fruit included. This would greatly increase the amount of fruit eaten by Americans, and make important strides in the fight against obesity.
Normally, fruit, with the exception of peaches, is disgusting and vile. It induces illness in many, rots and includes weird things like seeds. It is extremely difficult, because of the inherent evilness of fruit, to maintain it in one’s everyday diet. Ketchup isn’t gross though, and goes well as a condiment on decent, good foods like cheeseburgers. Maintaining ketchup as part of an everyday diet is easy and painless.
Ketchup is clearly a fruit, and officially labeling it as a fruit is an important tool in the campaign to fight obesity.