New York City Mayor Institutes Meatless Mondays in Public Schools
Earlier this week, Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, announced that all public schools in the country’s largest city will have meatless Mondays, every Monday.
Meatless Mondays, as a movement, started in 2003, spearheaded by a marketing guru with an eye for philanthropy. It’s taken off worldwide, but a full adoption by the public schools of a massive city like New York is one of its biggest achievements.
Beginning in the 2019/2020 school year, all of the 1.1 million kids in over 1,700 New York City public schools will be offered a vegetarian menu for breakfast and lunch, one day out of five. The menu is still being worked out, but de Blasio and other New York City officials say the menu will be budget-neutral, meaning it will not cost more than other meals.
The reasons for instituting this sort of plan are obvious and wide-ranging. Studies have repeatedly noted that not only does a properly formulated vegetarian diet provide all essential nutrients for children and adolescents, but that there are major advantages. Vegetarian diets have been shown to prevent or treat various ailments, among them type 2 diabetes, obesity, renal disease, and cardiovascular disease. There’s also the added benefit of not consuming livestock, which is a significant contributor to the country’s carbon footprint, especially considering the huge use of pesticides and fertilizer used on soy, which is mostly grown for livestock feed.
The announcement received vicious opposition from the conservative press and from the meat industry. The New York Post called it a “ridiculous stunt” and “experimenting on kids.” Fox News, in a piece which seems to be mostly about de Blasio’s presidential ambitions, called it “the latest case of the left’s misplaced ambitions.” Beef Magazine, an industry publication, wrote, “Without nutrient-dense and satiating animal fats and proteins, this is a dangerous, elitist and foolish policy that truly hurts our kids.”
Meatless Mondays has already gone through a pilot program in 15 Brooklyn schools; “participation,” which is another way of saying “do kids actually eat their food,” remained stable. The idea that kids will simply throw out vegetarian food, or any food they don’t like, is commonly lofted at vegetarian proposals like this one, but the pilot program indicated that that isn’t the case. Studies have shown that whether kids eat their veggies has a lot to do with outside factors besides whether they like them; for example, when recess is, or what the main dish is.
In any case, vegetarian Mondays will now become the norm for over a million of New York’s youngest.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].New York City Mayor Institutes Meatless Mondays in Public Schools
by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
March 21, 2019
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
What about cholesterol? That’s an essential nutrient for all hormone production. It’s not the meat that makes people unhealthy, it’s what else they eat. Aka grains, vegetable oils, and processed sugar.