NYC’s First Vegan Mayor Wants 'Healthier Options' Offered in Public School Lunches

Perhaps healthy "scratch-cooked meals" is the wave of the future.(CUNY Urban Food/CC)

Mayor Adams says 'children have been calling' him for healthier food, so what better time than now

New York City — Before becoming Mayor of Gotham City, Eric Adams wrote a vegan cookbook. In Healthy at Last, Adams is brutally honest about his past double "weight" problem — couldn't wait to eat. The McDonald's $1 menu topped the list.

Things changed, however, one morning when Adams woke up with a bloodshot right eye.

Though the two words start with the same three letters, "dia-," when Adams's doctor gave him the diagnosis of diabetes, the latter's grave pronunciation shot chills down his spine.

“When I left the pharmacy after my diagnosis," Adams recalls, "[...] I stared at those sad little pills in that sad little box and thought: I’ve come too far to live out of a pillbox, man. There must be a better way. A healthier way.”

From that day forward, Adams vowed to become a health warrior. And now, his attention seems to have turned to making over NYC's school lunch program.

“In one voice, we talk about fighting childhood obesity, diabetes yet you go into a school building every day and you see the food that feeds our health care crisis,” Mayor Adams said this week at a news conference, at City Hall.

Adams, when still Brooklyn borough president, led the charge to ban chocolate milk in public schools. The mayor's takeaway message was clear:

The plate is not only destroying mother nature, it's also destroying our mothers and our children as well.