DN Editorial: SLICE OF LIFE: Pizza's a vegetable. And politicians are turkeys.

ON THIS DAY before Thanksgiving, let's talk turkey. About pizza.

In what should have been a joke but, unfortunately, was not, Congress last week passed a bill that, in effect, counts pizza as a vegetable to meet nutritional standards for taxpayer-subsidized school lunches.

As Seth Meyers, of "Saturday Night Live" - with the aid of Kermit the Frog - put it: "Really?"

Really. And here's something else that's all too real: When it comes to a contest between money and science - or money and our children's health - well, there's really no contest.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been working since 2004 on new nutritional standards for school lunches that it unveiled in June. The standards followed scientific recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Among them: school lunches need more fruits and vegetables; limits on salt and starch (for example, french fries), and increased whole grains.

Yet, serving more fruits and vegetables would cut into the profits of industrial giants that make a lot of money marketing faux food to school districts. So, $5.6 million worth of lobbyists cooked up a spending bill slathered with amendments to undo the rules: the USDA can't limit the number of servings of starches (potatoes) to two per week, as the IOM advised, and two tablespoons of tomato paste - the amount smeared on a slice of frozen pizza - counts as a vegetable, not the half cup that the USDA proposed.

The decision looks even more idiotic when you consider that tomatoes make up only 31 percent of the red stuff on a pizza slice manufactured by ConAgra. The rest: pizza seasoning, dehydrated onion, guar and xanthum gums, garlic powder, potassium sorbate, citric acid, tricalcium phosphate, soybean oil and modified food starch.

Mmm, just like Grandma used to make.

Some conservatives have tried to dress up this sellout by claiming that the federal government has no right to tell children what to eat. Let them eat chicken nuggets. But school lunches are subsidized by the taxpayers, and we should not subsidize billions of empty calories - not when one out of three American children is already obese, and obesity is one of our biggest, and most expensive, public-health problems.

This national disgrace is not only, or even primarily, about what kids eat for lunch. It's really about the unhealthy state of affairs we call the legislative process. Twenty years ago, just the notion that ketchup might be classified as a vegetable in school lunches engendered ridicule and outrage. Now, it's just the way that the pizza crust (fortified with thiamine mononitrate, monocalcium phosphate and sorbitan monostearate) crumbles.

Until Congress finds the courage to choose science and health over lobbyists' cash, all that talk about how much they care about our children is so much baloney.