The Whole World Is Mocking Congress!

Anderson Cooper Mocks Congress In RidicuList For Classifying Pizza As Vegetable

by Josh Feldman | 1:08 pm, November 19th, 2011

This is the week many Americans may have finally abandoned all hope that Congress will ever accomplish anything meaningful. In the midst of a debate over school lunches, pizza was officially classified by our elected representatives as a vegetable. The qualifying standard is no less than two spoonfuls of tomato sauce. So this technically counts as a vegetable now. This quite literally reaches the height of political absurdity, and Anderson Cooper did a pretty thorough job of mocking the whole debate on his show last night.

The whole question of whether pizza is a vegetable was immediately included in the RidicuList segment of the show, and Cooper couldn’t help but wonder why this was an issue of contention. Congress made the change to fulfill a requirement for a certain number of vegetables in school lunches, so making pizza (or as Cooper noted, the stale cardboard they call pizza in schools) a vegetable means kids are technically getting their daily allowance.

It should be noted, and I can’t believe I have to point this out, that pizza is made up of not just tomatoes, but a bread crust and cheese. Call me crazy, but you can’t really classify something as part of one specific food group if it’s made up of foods from different groups. Also, tomatoes are technically fruits, so there’s that. But I digress.

Cooper enjoyed the reactions of both Jack Cafferty and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. He also had a moment of self-deprecation where he showed a clip of himself from his daytime show reacting badly to spinach.

But Cooper did acknowledge that it will be easier than ever to get your daily allowance of fruit and vegetables. Because if you count wine as a fruit and pizza as a vegetable, two glasses and three slices will get you everything you need for the day.

Watch the video below, courtesy of CNN: