Official Standards Sought for Plethora of New Pizzas

Once everyone knew what a pizza was: a baked pie of flattened dough spread with tomato sauce, covered with cheese and jazzed up with anchovies, sausage, even ham, pineapple or whatever.

That made it easy for the Agriculture Department to write standards to ensure that shoppers buying frozen pizzas would get what they paid for.

Now, however, restaurants serve “white pizzas”--no tomatoes--pizzas without cheese, pizzas with potatoes, barbecued chicken pizza, pizza topped with fruit.

What’s a government to do?

What restaurants serve is unregulated, but companies selling pizzas or other foods off store shelves often must cope with federal standards or guidelines.

The Agriculture Department is wrestling with an overhaul of standards for ordinary foods like pizza, beef stew and chile con carne without crimping anyone’s culinary style or locking out low-fat versions of traditional favorites.

It’s even toying with dropping standards altogether. The Food and Drug Administration has been conducting a similar review for non-meat products.

As of now, beef stew must have 25% beef to be labeled beef stew. No more than 40% of hot dogs can be fat and added water. “Sausage pizza” must be a “bread-based meat food product with tomato sauce, cheese and meat topping containing not less than 12% cooked sausage or 10% dry sausage (pepperoni).”

The department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service gives some wiggle room. Informal standards allow “white pizza with pepperoni.” Even there, the department says the product must be labeled as “white” and have a specified minimum amount of pepperoni.

The food industry, some consumer groups and the department wonder how this kind of recipe-writing fits in with the demand for lower-fat versions of traditional products. Nutritional labeling, required three years ago, and ingredient labels tell people more than they used to know about products.

“There are real limits to how much you can reduce the fat if you have to have a certain amount of meat or poultry,” said Margaret Glavin, a deputy administrator at the agency.

On the other side, too much tinkering with standards could revive the days of people being cheated with filler and inferior ingredients.

“Eliminating food standards is nothing less than an invitation for consumer fraud,” said Bruce Silverglade, legal affairs director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Tina Ike, in charge of nutrition and research at Gilardi Foods Inc., a Sidney, Ohio, maker of frozen pizzas, would like pizza defined as a crust with some topping.

“It’s much nicer to be able to say breakfast pizza and actually be able to describe it as pizza, rather than have to add words like white,” she said.

By her reasoning, standards for what goes into pepperoni, sausage and other ingredients should stay to prevent the marketing of substandard ingredients.