Waaaaaaaaaaaaaluuuuuuuuuuuu

[valis2]

Practicing my whale song there.

Home for 1.5 hours...of course, checking the flist.

Get thee gone from my friends list, fanficrants! Thou art driving me crazy and taking up much space on my fpage. Yeah. So bye.

I just had a major "Wuh!" moment...saw a pic of a good friend on her LJ...she's lost weight and gone blonde!

Today's show was decent...just busy enough to get through without being bored...just slow enough so that I could write a piece for the new quirkyhpshorts challenge...will be putting it up after I revise it a little, hopefully I'll have time to upload it Sunday night. Headache galore, saw the lovely family, had a horrid dinner at PF Chang's (I really dislike that restaurant), and will be zooming back to the hotel in another half hour so that I can try to sleep. Hopefully the people in the room above me will not desire a shower at 2 am like they did this morning. It sounded like a waterfall had suddenly exploded in my room.

No one shouted anything about catsup at me today. I'm rather depressed about that.

Comments

[morricone1900.livejournal.com]

"Under Reagan, ketchup became a vegetable. That's always been my favorite. Reagan's cutbacks in the federal school lunch program elicited criticism that there was no longer funding to provide a "balanced diet" to schoolchildren, including fresh vegetables. Reagan argued that ketchup is a vegetable because it is red and comes from tomatoes. The "liberal" media yucked it up about that one for few days and then forgot about it as soon as the next outrage got their attention. "
-H Scott Prosterman

and I'm not sure who wrote this one, but even more amusing:
---------------------------------
"And we thought ketchup as a vegetable was dumb? Well, America's diet has just gotten dumber:

WASHINGTON — Anyone trying to add more fresh fruits and vegetables to their diet may have just gotten an unlikely assist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Based on a little-noticed change to obscure federal rules, the USDA now defines frozen French fries as "fresh vegetables."

A federal judge in Texas last week endorsed the USDA's decision in a court case.

U.S. District Judge Richard Schell said the term "fresh vegetables" was ambiguous.

...(and, of course, the kicker:)

The USDA quietly changed the regulations last year at the behest of the French fry industry, which has spent decades pushing for a revision to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act.

The Frozen Potato Products Institute appealed to the USDA in 2000 to change its definition of fresh produce under PACA to include batter-coated, frozen French fries, arguing that rolling potato slices in a starch coating, frying them and freezing them is the equivalent of waxing a cucumber or sweetening a strawberry.


Does this mean all those school districts that have been trying to up the percentage of fresh fruits and veggies in their lunches are off the hook now? (Does this ruling have ramifications to the student-lunch program in general?) Heck -- put some ketchup on those fries, and we'll have a veritable cornucopia of fresh veggie goodness, right? The Bush ag department is carrying on the work of the Reagan budget department -- way to go!

That lobbyists actually shape our government nutrition programs -- from the food pyramid on down (why do you think we should "moderate" instead of "minimize" our salt and sugar intake?) -- is not surprising, but appalling nonetheless. Lobbyists and politicians control everything, science be damned (and, sadly, it's not unique to this notoriously anti-science administration).

I agree with the lawyer: "I find it pretty outrageous, really," said [Tim] Elliott, who argued that the Batter-Coating Rule is so vague that chocolate-covered cherries, packed in a candy box, would qualify as fresh fruit.

"This is something that only lawyers could do," Elliott said, pointing to a stack of legal documents debating the French fry change. "There must be 100 pages there about something you could summarize in one paragraph: Batter-coated French fries are not fresh vegetables."

I don't see how "fresh vegetables" is ambigious in the least. Go to the grocery store. See the piles of vegetables in the produce section? Those are fresh. See the bags in the freezer? Those are frozen, and hence not fresh. A frozen banana dipped in chocolate and nuts, while yummy, is not fresh fruit to anyone, except perhaps this bozo judge.

This isn't even a case for lawyers -- this is a case for kindergarteners. Show any five-year-old a carrot, a tomato, a cucumber and a bag of Ore-Ida crinkle cuts, and, even with the cuts to school health and nutrition programs, I bet she'll quickly notice that one of these things is not like the others."

-----------------------------

[morricone1900.livejournal.com]

*waves at laura in a different venue*