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French fries — they’re what’s for dinner


Many of us go to a lot of effort to make sure we get the recommended five fresh fruits and vegetables a day in our diets. Now that french fries have been classified as a fresh vegetable, it should be even easier to do this.

Yes, you read that correctly. A Texas judge ruled last week that those freshly battered grease sticks, typically full of sodium and cholesterol, qualify as fresh vegetables. Kind of like carrots.

As Andrew Buncombe reports in The Independent:

Judge Schell, from the town of Beaumont, made the ruling during a hearing concerning the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. The department’s proposal to list batter-coated fries as fresh was being challenged by a Dallas-area food distributor, Fleming Companies. The company is facing bankruptcy and the law requires creditors who sold fresh fruits and vegetables to be paid in full, while other creditors can receive partial payment.

“It’s unfathomable to me that, when Congress passed this law in 1930 and used the term ‘fresh vegetable,’ they ever could have conceived that large food-processing companies could have convinced USDA that a frozen battered french fry fell into that definition,” said Tim Elliott, Mr Fleming’s lawyer.

But the department said that the battered french fry classification applies only to rules of commerce, not nutrition. It did not consider an order of fries the same as an apple when it came to the school lunch test.

John Webster, a spokesman for the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, said: “The vegetables we are talking about encouraging the consumption of are dark green vegetables like broccoli and orange and yellow vegetables like squash.”

Webster can talk about encouraging the consumption of broccoli and squash all he wants. But given the dearth of money spent promoting healthy diets and the fact that the USDA isn’t saying ‘Yes, we called french fries fresh vegetables in this one instance, but they’re not healthy for you,’ does he seriously think the USDA has helped the obesity epidemic by classifying french fries as a fresh vegetable? After all, french fries are one of those things that restaurants really give more than one serving of. So now, not only can you get multiple servings of fresh vegetables under the guise of one, but you can increase your cholesterol and maybe even your weight while you’re at it …

And by the way, when did “fresh” become synonymous with “fried?” I’ve heard the phrase “fresh baked” (generally in reference to bread or cookies), but “fresh fried?!” Maybe it’s time for me to get an updated version of Webster’s Dictionary — or time for the courts to focus on the civil liberties that are beng stripped away in the name of the war on terrorism …

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