Batter-coated fries become health food

By Andrew Martin
Chicago Tribune

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U.S. District Judge Richard Schell last week endorsed USDA changes to federal regulations that govern what defines a fresh vegetable. The changes were made at the behest of the Frozen Potato Products Institute, which has spent decades pushing for revisions to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA).

The law was passed by Congress in 1930 to protect fruit and vegetable farmers if their customers went out of business without paying for their produce.

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 revised 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 suit is a patent from French-fry maker Lamb Weston 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.

But Schell sided with the USDA, which argued that the law's definition of fresh fruits and vegetables is so ambiguous that it should be left to the agency to define what it means.

Meir Stampfer, a nutrition professor at Harvard, said it "boggles the mind" that the USDA would label French fries a fresh vegetable because most commercial fries are fried in oil laden with artery-clogging trans fat.

Stampfer said the revision reaffirms his belief that nutritional advice should be moved out of the USDA to an agency specifically concerned with public health.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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