Inside the powerful lobby fighting for your right to eat pizza on any given day
THE 11,781 registered lobbyists in Washington are more than enough to represent even the most arcane special interests: The American Racing Pigeon Union, the Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute, the Owners of Ivory Miniatures.
Within corporate America, food industry lobbyists represent particularly specific interests: restaurants, frozen foods, franchises, beef, dairy, corn, apples.
But there is nothing quite like the pizza lobby.
“You can’t make pizza in a minute. You can’t drive through. We don’t have fryers,” says Lynn Liddle, executive vice president for communications, investor relations, and legislative affairs at Domino’s Pizza and chair of the American Pizza Community.
For decades, pizza makers have relied on the food’s natural advantage: Everybody loves it. Some 41 million Americans - more than the population of California – eat a slice of pizza on any given day. If pizza were a country, its sales would put it in the top 100 of global gross domestic product.
“Pizza is, without a doubt, the food of the gods,” says a 2014 video produced by the American Chemical Society that explains the chemistry behind pizza’s appeal.
Pizza is such an efficient cheese- delivery vehicle that a farmer-funded promotional agency, authorised and overseen by the federal government, pushed fast-food chains to load pizzas with more cheese. That effort led to Pizza Hut’s 2002 “Summer of Cheese” campaign and partially funded Domino’s 2009 introduction of its “American Legends” pizzas - pies topped with 40 per cent more cheese.
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-labelling rules, which take effect later this year, have seemed particularly onerous to pizzeria owners.
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 programme, but the kids, all they want to do is eat pizzas and burgers,’ “Colicchio testified to Congress in 2010. “We are adults here. It is up to us to do better.”
One by one, other purveyors of fast food have been convinced, nudged along by new laws or public shaming.
McDonald’s removed soda from Happy Meals and added calorie counts to its menus long before the government required it.
Wendy’s removed soda from its children’s menu, and Darden Restaurants, which operates Olive Garden, has reduced calories and sodium in its kids’ meals and made vegetables and milk the default side options. — WP-Bloomberg