Want fresh veggies? Have some fries
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.
- Tim Elliott
And this, y'all, is why I love Texas. Where else could this sort of crap be enshrined as legal precedent?
Batter-coated french fries are a fresh vegetable, according to the Agriculture Department, which has a federal judge's ruling to back it up.
But the department said today that the classification applies only to rules of commerce, not nutrition, and it doesn't consider an order of fries the same as an apple in school lunches.
The ruling last week by federal District Judge Richard Schell in Beaumont, Texas, allowed batter-coated french fries to be considered fresh vegetables under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. Most other frozen fries had been on the list since 1996.
Regulations under the law help to assure buyers of commodities such as french fries that they are getting what they ordered, said George Chartier, a spokesman for the department's Agricultural Marketing Service. Frozen fries are fresh simply because they don't meet the standard necessary for them to be listed as processed, and adding batter to the fries does not change the classification, he said.
The commodities act does not apply to nutrition, where batter-coated french fries are still considered processed food.
The department does not plan to repeat its experience in trying to classify ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches, Chartier said. The ketchup-as-vegetable proposal was put forward in the Reagan administration, and the department dropped the idea after it found itself not only opposed but laughed at.
Hey...if batter-coated French Fries are can be classified with a straight face as a vegetable, then purple is a fruit (in the words of the immortal Homer Simpson).
As I was reading this initially, all I could think of was that I really should have gone to law school. Just think of the fun I could have had with this in a courtroom.... It's amazing that a judge, of whom we really should be able to infer at least a modicum of common sense, can be a party to this sort of legal nonsense.
Of course, on the bright side, if battered-coated French Fries can be classified as a fresh vegetable, just think of the possibilities this might open. Using this as precedent, we could try to get the Four Basic Food Groups redefined as Sugar, Fat, Caffeine, and Alcohol (Kahlua & Cream would then be the perfect food). Beer might be recognized as a breakfast cereal (hey, hops and barley are grains, no??). Jack Daniels and Jim Beam just might become a man's best friend. The food and beverage industry will be in ecstasy...and Judge Schell will still be a DUMB@$$.
