March 9

In the 1980s, the dreaded Reagan Years, somebody in the Congress directed the United States Department of Agriculture to produce new guidelines for nutrition that would enable public schools to economize and still meet the guidelines necessary to receive federal funding for school lunch programs. On the 9th in 1981, in a move that can only be described as sheer brilliance, the USDA managed to juggle proper nutrition and economics by declaring that ketchup was a vegetable.