‘Fruit Leather’ Ignites Nutrition Dispute : Schools: Advocates want to add it to lunches, insisting it’s not junk food. But what does it weigh?

A half-ounce rectangle of dried puree could count as a much heftier serving of apples, apricots or other fruit in the school lunch of the future.

The food is called “fruit leather,” and its proponents are quick to point out that it’s different from the sugar-laden “chewy fruit snacks” marketed to children. Versions of fruit leather have been available for years at health food stores and Middle Eastern groceries.

Still, the food is new enough and strange enough for the Agriculture Department and a Washington-state company to debate fruit leather’s place in cafeterias serving meals to 25 million pupils a day.

The debate might have quietly lingered in a bureaucratic land of dueling nutritionists if Congress hadn’t gotten into the act.

It still might linger, depending on how seriously the department takes a message from Congress to see fruit leather in a new light.

Ron Sagerson, president and founder of a family business called Stretch Island Fruit Inc., started the fuss in 1993. His Grapeview, Wash., company makes an all-natural product using apple, pear and other fruit purees.

With the department’s blessing, Sagerson tried the product in some school districts in Washington and California. After all, this wasn’t one of those fat-added, sugar-added, syrup-added, xanthan gum-added “chewy fruit snacks.”

The department has ruled those products off-limits. No one there wants a repeat of the outrage that erupted in 1981 when the Ronald Reagan Administration classified ketchup as a vegetable.

Sagerson, however, was unhappy with the way the department decided to credit his product’s contribution to a balanced diet.

The department said the flat fruit is the same as dried fruit and counts as only one-eighth of a cup because that’s how much volume it occupies. Sagerson said it should be three-eighths of a cup, arguing that six pounds of fruit go into one pound of fruit leather.

Those distinctions are important, because schools get paid by the department based on portion sizes. School lunches must serve two or more fruits and vegetables totaling three-quarters of a cup. If fruit leather counts as only one-eighth of a cup, schools can’t justify the product’s cost.

Sagerson argued that his product should be treated more like orange juice concentrate or tomato paste. A tablespoon of orange juice concentrate gets credit as a quarter of a cup because the water is added.

The department says it can’t do that, because no “standard of identity” exists for the purees in fruit leather. That means another agency, the Food and Drug Administration, hasn’t set a basic recipe for fruit leather, so there’s no way to know what the product contains, or how much water was taken out.

“We can’t always say an eighth of a cup of fruit leather will always contain three apples,” said Marion Hinners, senior nutritionist at the department’s Food and Consumer Service. “Nothing restricts the company to make their products that way.”

The product can be confusing. It has flavors such as “tangy apricot” and “berry blackberry,” but all use apples and pears as the main ingredient. Those fruits add essential fiber to the diet. But an apricot bar doesn’t provide a measurable amount of the vitamin A found in real apricots.

Congress decided that the department shouldn’t mull this over much longer. Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) added some instructions to the just-passed 1996 spending bill for the Agriculture Department.

The bill recommends that products such as fruit leather be evaluated as 100% fruit and credited as fruit concentrates.

But Ron Vogel, deputy administrator for special nutrition programs, says he’s not convinced the language will require change. Besides, he says, “I don’t know that we’re going to have an answer for the Congress within the next month or so.”