Meatless School Lunches: A Misguided Campaign
The mayor made a choice to be vegan (“Vegan schools? Salad but true,” Kyle Smith, Feb. 5). Others should be afforded the same opportunity to make dietary choices.
Milk, eggs and cheese are high-quality, inexpensive protein for children’s growing bodies.
This is especially important for children who may have limited resources at home and depend on school meals for adequate nutrition.
As Michelle Obama found out: If children do not like the food, it will end up in the garbage. Catherine Berntsen
Staten Island
I must say I’m quite distressed over the mayor forcing vegan meals on our children without other options.
That means my grandson will go hungry at least once a week unless I send him something on those days, but many parents can’t afford to and rely on school meals to feed their child/children. J. Alvarez
Queens
Kyle Smith needs a class in nutrition. Vegan lunches in schools on Friday is not some sort of oppressive attack on students. It is one solution to a real problem in this city.
About 20 percent of New York City children are overweight and another 25 percent are obese, and Smith is terrified of the impact cauliflower will have?
He does not want to punish kids who went through COVID by feeding them vegetables, even though many of their obese relatives may have died from that very disease. Bob Najdek
Queens
Is this really something that the mayor should be
involved in?
Forcing vegan lunches on children who have suffered through two years of suffocating, useless mask mandates and worthless remote learning is cruel.
School lunches are barely edible as it is. This ensures that pretty much every child will go hungry on vegan Friday.
With crime soaring, businesses leaving, restaurants closing and people moving out, should vegan school lunches be on the mayor’s agenda at all? What a child eats should be in the parent’s realm of preference, not the mayor’s.
Maureen McGroarty
Brooklyn
So far, the first month of this new administration has been a Dumpster fire rather than a breath of fresh air after the last eight disastrous years.
Doesn’t Adams have more important things to do than foist “vegan Fridays” on school kids?
The city is reeling from street violence, cop killings, shoplifting, gun crimes, muggings, subway violence, the homeless, random beatings, etc. Businesses are trying to stay afloat while coping with mask and vaccine
mandates. Parents are unsure if their children will ever resume their education and afterschool activities in a normal, healthy manner and without masks.
My guess is that he may have been a good cop, but he has absolutely no clue how to actually govern the city.
He’s looking more and more like another bloviating politician who’s big on cronies, long on speeches and short on actual results. Vincent Ruggiero
Scottsdale, Ariz.
It’s nice that Adams wants people to be healthy — but forcing vegan meals on children?
Whatever happened to leading, as opposed to forcing? Be a leader in healthy foods.
We all know our children need healthy role models, but I fear that forcing this on them will push many away. Also, veganism isn’t the only healthy alternative out there. Steve Preziosa
Deptford, NJ
Humans evolved over the millennia as omnivores — whose diet includes meat, fruits and vegetables — and not as herbivores, whose diet excludes meat. Vegan and strict vegetarian diets are unnatural and lacking in protein.
Should we be compelling public-school kids to endure vegan-only lunches once a week to satisfy the anti-meat bias of our vegan mayor?
There is nothing unethical or unhealthy about consuming meat products. Carnivores, like cats, will settle for nothing else and do just fine. Dennis Middlebrooks
Brooklyn