The USDA reclassified frozen French fries

LOL...how lame can you be.

From a bag of frozen french fries taken from doglover's freezer:


Ingredients:

POTATOES, VEGTABLE OIL SHORTENING (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED CANOLA OIL, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN OIL), DISODIUM DIHYDROGEN PYROPHOSPHATE, DEXTROSE.

That doesn't seem FRESH to me!

I thought that they could only be marketed as "Freedom Fries" anyhow.

hahaha! Maybe there's an answer on the USDA website. I'll check it out (eventually).

There's nothing on their site, so I e-mailed the question; but I did find news stories about it.
The US Department of Agriculture made the controversial decision last year, but it only came to light last week during the course of a court case in Texas.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-afries15jun15%2C0%2C202707.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
The USDA quietly changed the regulations last year at the behest of the french fry industry, which has spent the past five decades pushing for a revision to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA). The law was passed by Congress in 1930 to protect fruit and vegetable farmers in the event that their customers went out of business without paying for their produce.
"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."
Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said it "boggles the mind" that the USDA would label French fries a fresh vegetable since most commercial fries are prepared in oil laden with heart-clogging trans-fat.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0615-02.htm
The french fry rule calls to mind the USDA's attempt in 1981 to classify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables, an idea that was dropped amid public protests.

Here's the answer I got in e-mail. Explains a lot:

Thank you for contacting the Food and Nutrition Information Center. The classification applies only to rules of commerce and not to nutrition.
French Fries are not classified as fresh vegetables according to the Food Guide Pyramid or the National School Lunch Program. They are still
considered processed foods.

For more information on this please see the following link to the Chicago
Tribune's article entitled USDA: Frozen Fries Are 'Fresh' Veggies by Andrew Martin. Registration is required but it is free.
http://www.latimes.com/services/site/premium/access-registered.intercept.

I hope this is helpful.

Denise Jacobs
Information Specialist
Food & Nutrition Information Center
10301 Baltimore Avenue, Room 105
Beltsville, MD 20705-2351
[email protected]
www.nal.usda.gov/childcare

At'sa good. The first thing that came to mind for me was the Reagan administration "ketchup as vegetable" thing. And I was only five then.

Yeah, me too.
It makes me mad when you see a story like this hyped up and then it turns out not to meet the hype, though! Why do this to us?
Honest reporting, that's all I ask!
I suppose that wouldn't have gotten our attention or made the news, though. Our own fault, really.

All to funny