A processed meat ban may be coming for New York City’s 1.1 million students in the city’s public school system.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and city council members want to improve city public school lunches making them healthier and leaner. In a statement about the resolution to do so Adams said, “if we want to change the culture of bad food, we need to rethink the way we feed our kids in the schools.”
This movement, spearheaded by Adams and Councilman Fernando Cabrera calls on the Department of Education to remove processed foods from cafeterias once and for all, citing the World Health Organization’s classification of processed meat as a group 1 carcinogen.
Every day the city’s public school system provides nearly 950,000 meals to students but of these meals, it is unknown how many include processed food. Adams says that the city has been making some progress in making school lunches healthier. Some cafeterias have even taken on the “meatless Monday” initiative, a plan originally instituted during World War I that has now taken on a new life as a pilot program across the city.