Did everyone see that the Child Nutrition Bill that the First Lady has been pushing is on its way to be signed into law! They are putting pizza in the catagory with doughnuts and bake sales…etc. The following is a quote:
Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says the bill is aimed at curbing daily or weekly bake sales or pizza fundraisers that become a regular part of kids’ lunchtime routines. She says selling junk food can easily be substituted with nonfood fundraisers.
“These fundraisers are happening all the time,” Wootan said. “It’s a pizza sale one day, doughnuts the next… It’s endless. This is really about supporting parental choice. Most parents don’t want their kids to use their lunch money to buy junk food. They expect they’ll use their lunch money to buy a balanced school meal.”
My question is: WHEN DID PIZZA BECOME JUNK FOOD??? :?
Our pizza shop is across the street from a high school. We sell 20 XXLG each day for slices! I’m wondering if they can tell the kids not to go to certain businesses on their own time! How hard it is to be a kid/parent/business today! It makes me want to puke!
Did you read the portion of the bill that requires schools to offer meals for supper too??
This is not really a question of hurting small business as much as it is a slow deterioration of personal choice and freedoms.
Personally, I prefer to have the family supper time every those psa’s that have been touting so oft you’ve been seeing of late… …of course, those psa’s, government pays for those too.
What exactly is it that they do anyways? The only time we hear from them is when we get our renewal notice. Maybe it’s time for them to step up and play a more active role in representing us.
What I don’t understand is why the parents aren’t responsible for their kids lunches and dinners? When I was growing up, we had dinner with everyone at the table at a certain time! NO MATTER WHAT!! Now a days, nobody eats together. Thank goodness for the family values my parents taught me and I can teach them to our kids no matter how busy we are!
You guys are late to the party! Months before passing. Restaurateurs and the NRA were not vocal enough. Hell the NRA handed our government and huge corporations’ control of our food supply! What you see now is nothing! There are multiple layers of bureaucracy that will affect everyone in this country. Over the next few years everything from seed production to final product will cost more and be more regulated by the government. Funny thing is competition kept our food supply largely safe, the new distribution rules and regulation will drive up distribution costs and make us less safe. Large distributors loved the bill because it really hurts small independent distributors, farmers markets and small producers. Ironically many distributors all ready had safe food handling procedures in place that superseded what the government in now regulating, those with the strong procedures can now scale back their efforts because its cheaper to meet the regulation than exceed it as they were doing.
The restaurant industry needs to do a better job of being vocal.
Actually, pizza was branded as a snack food back in the 50’s and 60’s. This is when no one would ever think of serving “pizza” as a meal entre, then came the pizza wars of the 70’s and the outcome of that was the pizza with more toppings on it than were ever before imagined. This had the effect of allowing pizza to rise in status to meal entre. Now, all of a sudden, pizza and a salad were considered pretty decent meal fare, and pizza has never stopped to look back. The problem that pizza is facing today, in my opinion, appears to have started when two things happened. 1) When we started super sizing everything and it seems as though this lead us into losing track of what a decent portion of anything was. Compound this, 2) In our endeavor to make pizzas even better (whatever that means) we started pitting double cheese onto the pizzas, and then putting cheese into the crust. In my opinion, all this resulted in was a HUGE caloric increase in a slice of pizza. When the two are combined, more calories, and eating greater amounts of pizza, at an ever increasing frequency due to the inability of many parents to cook family meals (you all know what I mean by this), we have a good thing gone very bad. The result, as I see it, is pizza getting tossed into the junk food drawer. We have been demonstrating to pizza show goers for several years now, how you can make a thin crust pizza taste absolutely great by simply putting on a little fresh tomato (slices) or a hand full of tomato filets, and then adding something on the order of 3.5 to 4-ounces of whole milk Mozzarella cheese onto a 12-inch skin, and topping it with a healthy meat or vegetable option, and have a wonderfully delicious pizza that looks gourmet, but which in actuality, costs less than a run of the mill 12-inch similarly topped pizza. Pizza like I’ve described is both great tasting and it also has more than just a little nutritional value too, but without all the fat and salt (sodium) that pizza is beginning to get branded with. The future of pizza is ours, we can continue to mega size and mega calorie it, or we can work to change the image it is getting. Just look at what Domino’s is doing with their pizza for the school lunch programs. We can do it too.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
A great post Tom and full of thruths about sizing, double cheesing etc.
Those operators who go down that path as their standard fare are doing the pizza industry a disservice and placing it in the junk food sector.
Since being in the industry (5 years) we have continually strived to make a pizza at our place a “healthy option”. Sure we get people wanting extra cheese or double up of toppings, but we addressed sizing by deleting our jumbo (18") size, addressed the cheese “health” connontation by using only low fat mozzarella (and using less)and adding a host of gourmet pizzas which have fewer toppings, skewed to “healthy” ingredients towards/including vegetarian styles.
Over the past year and a half we have decreased the dough weight of our bases by around 20% making them a more thinner base (we were fairly thin before), decreased salt and sugar content in the sauce and dough and our new trend is growing our own herbs (rocket, corriander, basil, oregano, italian parsley) and gourmet toppings (roma and grape tomatos, chillies).
We are pushing the healthy factors heavily and once we get our home grown ingredients all on track this will be pushed hard as well.
One are we have made a good go of is gluten free bases. Not only gluten intolerant people buying them but people who see them as a healthy alternative are as well.
All of this is the future driving force of our business, not the buy 3 for $XXX sale format. Plus the gourmet sector brings in far better sales and profits.
There will be a market for the heavy based, heavy topping, heavy cheese pizzas but in time this market will decrease leaving those operators in the extinct dinosaur sector. Already in Australia we are seeing a major shift to gourmet pizzas with previous independents in this field extremely quickly increasing store numbers and franchising across the country. A recent industry PMQ Australia article places the growth of gourmet chains as the biggest threat to traditional pizzas stores, rather than the previous PH, Domino’s and Eagle Boys, although EB and Doms are strongly pushing the gourmet and Healthy Tick (a campaign by the Aust Heart Foundation) themes.
That’s exactly what I was thinking of when I saw this post.
Pizza doesn’t have to be junk food, and health food doesn’t have to be boring. I think it’s great when people take a “fun” food that kids will eat and make it in a way that is nutritious.
I always loved pizza lunch day when I was in school.