The ketchup as a vegetable controversy stemmed from proposed regulations of school lunches by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in 1981, early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The regulations were intended to provide meal planning flexibility to local school lunch administrators coping with cuts to the National School Lunch Program enacted by the Omnibus Reconciliation Acts of 1980 and 1981. The proposed changes allowed administrators to meet nutritional requirements by crediting food items not explicitly listed. While ketchup was not mentioned in the original regulations, pickle relish was used as an example of an item that could count as a vegetable. A similar controversy arose in 2011, when Congress passed a bill prohibiting the USDA from increasing the amount of tomato paste required to constitute a vegetable; the bill allowed pizza with two tablespoons (30 mL) of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable.
Summary The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, reduced the Federal School Lunch and Child Nutrition Programs budget by approximately eight percent. Building upon these reductions, the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 (passed as the Gramm–Latta Budget) slashed the 1982 budget for the Federal School Lunch Program by an additional 25 percent. To administer the requirements made by the acts, the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) was tasked with proposing ways to implement the regulations while maintaining nutritional requirements for school lunches despite the lower funding. Among the recommendations made in September 3, 1981 was a proposal to give local school lunch administrators flexibility in accrediting substitute food items that met FNS nutritional requirements and regulations. The report stated an item could not be counted as a bread that was not enriched or whole-grain, "but could credit a condiment such as pickle relish as a vegetable." In the Reagan administration’s attempt to slash $1.5 billion from children’s nutrition funding, school lunch program requirements were worded (whether deliberately or not) so as to conceivably allow for designating ketchup as a vegetable, allowing the USDA to eliminate one of the two vegetables required to meet minimum food and nutrition standards, and thus shrink costs. It also offered a group of protein substitutes – yogurt, nuts and sunflower seeds – and suggested that tofu, a soybean cake, be substituted for a hamburger to save money. Critics demonstrated outrage in Congress and in the media against the Ronald Reagan administration for cutting school lunch budgets and allowing ketchup and other condiments to count as vegetables. According to New York Times reporter Benjamin Weinraub, "the opposition had a Dickensian field day of outrage and mockery that contrasted school children's shrinking meal subsidies with the Pentagon generals' groaning board of budget increases."
Legislative history The Food and Nutrition Service proposed regulations had roots in four previous pieces of legislation: the National School Lunch Act of 1946, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980, and the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981.
National School Lunch Act The National School Lunch Act of 1946 established the nonprofit National School Lunch Program to ensure the health and well-being of American children and increase the domestic consumption of agricultural products and commodities. Under Section II of the National School Lunch Act, eligible students at all participating schools gained access to free or reduced-cost school lunches. Served lunches had to meet minimum nutrition requirements as stated in Section 9a, and as set by the Secretary of Agriculture. As the 1981 Food and Nutrition Service regulations later explained, while no formal requirement existed requiring that school lunches provide a specific percentage of daily nutrients, it had come to be expected that meals would generally provide one third of daily Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA).
Child Nutrition Act The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 further enhanced and strengthened the National School Lunch Program by extending the Special Milk Program, piloting a breakfast program, and adding support for non-food items such as equipment and additional staff. In addition, the act centralized the management and ongoing administration of the School Lunch Program to the US Department of Agriculture.
Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980 Within its broad goal to "implement the reconciliation requirements provided for in the First Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for the fiscal year 1981", the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980 amended both the National School Lunch Act of 1946 and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 by cutting funding for the School Milk Program, establishing ceiling rates for grants on nutrition, and reducing provisions to specific, qualified institutions. It also made a range of cost-savings provisions—including reducing federal funding for school lunch general reimbursements, commodity, special assistance, and the child care food program-to reduce the Federal School Lunch and Child Nutrition Programs budget by eight percent.
Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 Title VIII of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 extended the spending cuts enacted by the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980 to include ending federal assistance for food service materials and shrinking appropriations allocated for nutrition education, special assistance, the child care food program, and the School Milk Program. The term "school", as defined in the Child Nutrition Act, now excluded private institutions with annual tuition exceeding specified amounts. The act also revised the income eligibility standards which determined which students received reduced cost or no-cost lunches and introduced stricter checks and balances to prevent income fudging. The previous requirement that a child's family income be at or below $17,560 to receive a reduced cost or no-cost lunch was dropped to $15,630 and the following new income standards were established:
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