Food fight: Keeping America’s favorite vegetable a vegetable

KENNEWICK — What is a vegetable? It may sound like a silly question posed by philosophers with too much time on their hands pondering the nature of creation. But it’s a serious query, and one that is mobilizing potato growers and the organizations that represent them as academics and nutritionists from some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions prepare to rewrite the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a document used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to implement everything from commodity and crop support programs to the federal school lunch program to recommendations given to doctors about the dietary advice they should give to patients.