a wolf angel is not a good angel

Strange little news item:

French fries may be the bane of low-carb diets and obesity foes, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a federal judge in Texas have another name for the popular food: fresh vegetable.

U.S. District Judge Richard Schell last week endorsed little-noticed changes by the USDA to federal regulations that govern what defines a fresh vegetable. The changes were made at the behest of the french-fry industry, which has spent the last five decades pushing for revisions to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act.

Frying potato strips is just cosmetic. (And what a fascinating name for an institute.)

The Frozen Potato Products Institute appealed to the USDA in 2000 to change its definition of fresh produce under the law to include batter-coated, frozen french fries, arguing that rolling potato slices in a starch coating, frying them and freezing them is the equivalent of waxing a cucumber or sweetening a strawberry.

My definition of fresh food is not the legal definition, but mine at least verges on reasonable.

Tim Elliott, a Chicago attorney who recently challenged the revision in a Texas federal courtroom on behalf of a bankrupt food distributor, said defining french fries as fresh vegetables defies common sense.

“I find it pretty outrageous, really,” said Elliott, who argues that the Batter-Coating Rule is so vague that chocolate-covered cherries, packed in a candy box, would qualify as fresh fruit.

“This is something that only lawyers could do,” he said, pointing to a stack of legal documents debating the french-fry rule change. “There must be 100 pages there about something you could summarize in one paragraph: batter-coated french fries are not fresh vegetables.”

Among the documents cited in the lawsuit is a patent from french-fry maker Lamb Weston — which has a Twin Falls processing plant — on how to make batter-coated fries.

“After partial dehydration, the potato strips are coated with an aqueous slurry,” the patent says. “The aqueous starch enrobing slurry … is comprised of a combination of chemically modified ungelatinized potato starch, chemically modified ungelatinized cornstarch, rice flour and other optional ingredients.”

“Fresh vegetables are not typically associated with ‘aqueous starch enrobing slurries,”‘ Elliott wrote in court documents.

See, frying to me is processing. And cooking them. So they’re not fresh, or fresh-but-then-frozen, which I assume the law is meant to cover as well.

“They fall into the category of fresh because they are not processed,” said agency spokesman George Chartier. “They are not transformed in the sense of being cooked.”

Though a USDA news release announcing the revision says caramel-coated apples also will be considered fresh fruit under the Batter-Coating Rule, officials say the gooey treats would not be included because coating it changes the character of the fruit and makes it a candy.

Frying and battering potato strips, however, does not change the character of a potato, they argued.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2004 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Random bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.