It’s Frozen, Old and Fresh

Good news recently for those of us who want to live longer by eating healthier and joining the jihad against national obesity without actually giving up any of the things we really, really like because they taste so good though probably we shouldn’t eat them so much. Or at all. If you know the feeling.

The Frozen Potato Products Institute, a name that connotes scientific sages in white lab coats, made a suggestion in 2000 to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a name that connotes a vast, sprawling urban bureaucracy in white shirts infesting a federal district once a swampy part of Maryland. The institute thought it a good idea to quietly amend a 70-year-old rule, the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, that defines fresh vegetables. The change doesn’t turn batter-coated French fries into an apple equivalent on school lunch menus, but it offers certain trade and legal protections -- once intended for farmers -- to makers of said fries.

Now, some of us may have spent a blissful lifetime thinking that “fresh” has something to do with newly harvested and basically unprocessed, and the word “vegetable” is somehow linked to those weirdly shaped things that grow out of sight in the ground and need washing. That a phrase like “fresh vegetables” would require a written definition is tribute to the surplus crops of lawyers who sprout in the aforesaid swamp. Without painfully drafted and impeccably vague definitions, what is there to fight over for all those billable hours? And then later to amend?

The potatoes may have been carved into rippled shapes, coated with batter and deep-fried in oil (and you don’t want to know where that oil came from). But they weren’t carved, coated and sizzled sufficiently to still not be sort of fresh. Kind of. So the agricultural bureaucrats thought about that for three years or so (billable hours, right?). And 13 months ago, they decided that, yes, pieces of once-fresh vegetable that had been rather processed could still be considered fresh because they retained a certain perishability that the state of freshness requires.

And then another lawyer, representing a bankrupt food processor (remember, those billable hours again), thought that was sufficiently silly to challenge in federal court. He said, among other things, that the new definition would allow cherries, for instance, to be entombed in chocolate and still be considered fresh.

Looking for a “born on” date is probably not the top priority of foraging chocolate-cherry lovers.

Nothing fazed U.S. District Judge Richard Schell in Texas, where they know a bit about frying.

Schell issued a fresh ruling before dinner one day last month that the term “fresh vegetables” was ambiguous, and he would allow the challenged fries to keep the designation.

Now, about fresh carrot cake....