Did anyone ever warn you about the “Freshman Fifteen”? One of the largest contributors to average weight gain for freshman is pizza.

Just to give you an idea of the prevalence of pizza in the life of students, Google “pizza Dorchester” and dozens of restaurants pop up. Type in “pizza Boston” and you’ll find over 200 restaurants.

But now, thanks to recent activity by Congress, one of the most popular foods in the United States, the paradigmatic college food, is a vegetable. Yes, pizza is a vegetable.

Baring special pizzas, let us for a moment examine the ingredients in a traditional piece of cheese pizza. The dough involves yeast, warm water, flour, olive oil and a pinch of salt – of course dough recipes vary, but these are the basic components. Cheese, well, we all know what cheese is. Cheese is wonderful, but it is not a vegetable. According to news it is the tomato paste in the sauce that qualifies pizza as a vegetable.

Tomatoes are nice too. They go well in salads, amplify the wonderful taste of grilled cheese, and their mashed up, seasoned form is now considered a vegetable, but is it a title they deserve?

What exactly is a tomato? It is a fruit! A fruit is a means for a plant to reproduce. Strawberries, for example, have seeds on the outside that are unwittingly dropped by consumers. An easy way to tell a vegetable from a fruit is the presence of seeds. Lettuce, spinach, and carrots don’t have seeds; therefore, they are veggies. Tomatoes have seeds. Therefore, they are fruits.

At least if you compare apples and oranges you are working within the same category of food. Comparing a heavily cooked, cheapened fruit to a fresh vegetable is an even larger misdemeanor. This comparison by itself is preposterous, but the outcome of the ruling on tomato paste is even more despicable.

Because pizza contains two tablespoons of tomato or vegetable paste (with a tomato base) it now counts as meeting the necessary serving-size of vegetables required to have a “healthy lunch.” The motive behind this movement was to prevent school lunches from becoming healthier in elementary and middle schools, places where the menu always includes pizza.

Remember in elementary school when pizza was something special, that only came once a week? Now it is a regular item on those industrial plastic serving trays.

The logic behind this insane decision is tenuous. Making tomato paste a non-vegetable (thus discounting pizza as a substitute for real vegetables) would cost too much money for schools. Funding for public schools, by the way, has been cut substantially over the past few decades. So, whose fault is it really that they can’t afford healthier alternatives? All of this was done to combat an initiative by the Obama Administration to make kids healthier. Republicans forbid that we spend a little extra to reduce childhood obesity which has, according to the Centers for Disease Control, tripled in the past 30 years. In 2008, one in five children were obese. 20 percent of children are obese. A pizza becomes a vegetable, chair legs at the lunch table will buckle as belts stretch, while the obesity epidemic is fattened with each passing lunch break.

Sure, tomato paste by itself isn’t bad – by itself it doesn’t contribute much to obesity. Kids aren’t stuffing their face with raw tomato paste. This ingredient is covered with cheese, wrapped in carbohydrate-laden dough, and baked between 300 – 450 degrees. No one needs to wonder why obesity is an epidemic – it is so obvious. Although tomato paste is by itself not bad (even comparable to something like an apple – a fruit), adding cheese and dough is a recipe for morbid obesity. One more tasty nail in the coffin of America’s bloated youth.