Every time Congress, whether it be the Senate or the House of Representatives, gets waylaid because the Republican Party is pulling some bullshit, we get images of White House staffers bringing in stacked boxes of pizza. There’s a few reasons for that. One is that everybody loves pizza.* The other is that pizza companies have banded together over the years to make sure that nutritional guidelines conveniently push them outside of the “fast food” boundary. This is something that has hurt other—very similar—industries, Bloomberg explained this move a couple of years ago.
More recently, though, pizza has become a target, lumped into a nutritional axis of evil along with French fries and soda. New federal nutrition standards for school lunches, part of a 2010 law, squarely targeted pizza’s dominance in cafeterias. Menu-labeling rules, which take effect later this year, have seemed particularly onerous to pizzeria owners. And in the popular imagination, no less than First Lady Michelle Obama and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio, though they claim to love the stuff, have emerged as enemies of pizza in their push for healthier school lunches. “I hear people say, ‘We would like to improve the school lunch program, but the kids, all they want to do is eat pizzas and burgers,’” Colicchio said in testimony to Congress in 2010. “We are adults here. It is up to us to do better.” [...]
Pizza advocates have taken a different, more combative tack. They’ve separated themselves from other food groups in Washington to become their own lobbying force. They’re not throwing money around — pizza’s biggest spenders devoted less than $500,000 to lobbying last year and just $1.5 million in political contributions in the last two election cycles. But they have notched some successes, proving that under the right circumstances, firm resolve and a thin crust can still be persuasive in Congress.
The lobby continues to take on quite a few things. FDA regulations asking for nutritional information to be present on menus for one. The frozen pizza industry had their own set of issues, as they sold to schools and getting hit with nutritional guidelines that don’t allow them to call tomato paste a vegetable side, was a big threat to their sales.
Under the existing rules, tomato paste is given extra credit toward a vegetable serving because it's made of concentrated tomatoes. So 2 tablespoons of tomato paste — roughly the amount on a slice of pizza — is counted as a half a cup, or the equivalent of one vegetable serving. For school lunch purposes, a slice of pizza was considered a serving of vegetables, a point first made by Wootan in 2011 that became a late-night punchline. The Department of Agriculture’s new rules, though, would have stopped giving tomato paste extra credit: From now on, 2 tablespoons would count as 2 tablespoons. Kraig Naasz, CEO of the American Frozen Food Institute, a trade group that lobbies for frozen pizza, says the tomato paste rule was simply a crafty way to get pizza out of schools: “None of our members wanted the federal government to say, ‘Pizza is bad for you.’ You would have been telling an entire generation that pizza is a food you shouldn’t consume.”
All of these new nutritional guidelines, that were spearheaded during the Obama administration, fell back this past year when the now-Republican FDA decided to roll back school lunch guidelines. This is why the pizza lobbyists seem to have spent a considerable amount of their money on Republican candidates.
For the pizza lobby, even better times may lie ahead. Fresh and frozen, the pizza industry tends to support Republicans. In the last two election cycles, Republican federal candidates received about $1.3 million from the industry, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of major companies and those listing “pizza” in their name. Democrats received just $157,000. (The biggest beneficiary was 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, despite published reports that he pulls the cheese off his pizza.)
It doesn’t matter if the CEO of the pizza company is a bigoted idiot who runs a shady business. Money talks, and the numbers are pretty intensely one-sided. According to the Center for Responsive Politics here’s a quick breakdown of Pizza Hut, which spent almost 99 percent of the $685,369 it gave to political groups on Republicans. The next chunk came from a group of pizza manufacturers who spent more than three quarters of their combined $550,000 in political contributions on Republicans. Papa John’s predictably spent close to 90 percent of their money on Republicans and Dominos followed with just south of 80 percent of theirs.
Pizza is great. But too much of anything isn’t good for anyone.
*I realize that some people don’t love pizza.