ADAMS FOOD FIGHT

Calls school-lunch gripers healthy-meal foes

Take this with a grain of salt.

Mayor Adams on Tuesday defended public school lunches, saying many complainers just aren’t used to “healthy” food.

“We cannot be afraid . . . [of] those people who are the loudest and say, ‘We should not be giving our children healthy food,’ ” he said at a press conference.

Adams cited an Instagram account that’s been documenting the purportedly foul fare served up at a Queens high school, and said New Yorkers should instead focus on the damage caused by unhealthy foods.

“How about them doing an Instagram of how our children are dying? How about looking at what food is actually doing to our children?” he said. “We have to ignore the noise and stay focused on the mission.”

The mayor insisted that students will get used to the more nutritious options.

“The first wave, people are going to say, ‘OK, I’m not getting my taste buds,’ because you’re making a transformation in your taste buds,” Adams said. “We’re going to learn with these tests and with our children, we should not be leaning into that Instagram . . . of those small number of people who are the loudest.”

The comments could be hard to swallow for schoolkids who testified before the City Council last week about unsavory lunch offerings.

“I’ve been served stale waffles during breakfast and barely cooked chicken nuggets and fries,” one student said.

Adams, a healthy-eating advocate who says he reversed his diabetes and lost a substantial amount of weight by improving his diet conceded that there is room for improvement.

But he vowed not to be swayed by complaints into abandoning his efforts to reduce junk food from pupils’ diets.

“Is it 100% what we want? No. But will we get to 100% what we want? Yes,” said Adams. “This is a medically proven fact that we are feeding our health-care crisis.” he said.

Adams, who speaks frequently about the benefits of plant-based and healthy eating, insisted that students have expressed to him that they appreciate eating veggies, and that it’s incumbent upon “responsible adults” to ensure kids aren’t being fed the types of calorically dense processed, sweet and savory food they often prefer.

“There are children that will say I would rather have that pizza, I would rather have this. But we as responsible adults are supposed to say, we need to make sure we have that balance to give what’s good for you and it’s going to make you nutritionally strong and healthy.”

In May, The Post reported on a student-run Instagram account that characterized one meal served at Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens as “slathered diarrhea all over my plate.”

The food displayed on the account is (inset) often fried or bare-bones dishes — not the nutrient-filled greens Adams says schools are increasingly offering.