'Meatless Mondays' Expanding To All NYC Schools

NEW YORK — City schools won't be serving Sloppy Joes on Monday any time soon. New York City is expanding its "Meatless Mondays" program to every public school to guarantee that all 1.1 million students start the week with a vegetarian option, officials said Monday.

The city tested vegetarian breakfasts and lunches on Mondays in 15 Brooklyn schools last spring. While the program was expanded across the city this school year, it is now an official policy and every school will be participating come September, city officials said.

The city says the cost-neutral expansion across its largest-in-the-nation school system will be good for the environment and for students' health. The program was backed by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who reportedly reversed his Type 2 diabetes with help from a vegan diet.

"Little Johnny eats a hamburger on Monday, he doesn't get colon cancer on Tuesday," Adams said Monday at Kensington's P.S. 130 The Parkside School. "But he is starting the process of moving down a road that is going to lead to what we now have: an uncontrollable health care crisis."

The city's school menus show meat-free meals on Mondays under the "Jumpstart Mondays" banner. Dishes have included muffins and egg sandwiches for high school breakfasts and mozzarella sticks and veggie tacos for younger students' lunches.

The city worked to make sure it got the meals right in the first 15 schools and eventually brought the program to more buildings, schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said. A few schools still served meat in salads until last month but all schools will have meat-free meals starting in the 2019-20 school year, city officials said.

The Department of Education's Office of Food and Nutrition Services will collect feedback from kids before next fall's menu is finalized, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio's office.

"We wanted to make sure that we could get the menu right so that students would like what they were eating," Carranza said. "So we had lots of input from students, we had lots of taste-testing."

Dozens of other school districts across the country, including Los Angeles's, have implemented Meatless Mondays, as have the city's 11 acute care public hospitals.

Mondays are ironically followed by burger Tuesdays on this month's school lunch menus. But Carranza said meatless meals may not be confined to Mondays in the future.

And de Blasio indicated kids will still be welcome to pack a hearty, meat-stuffed sandwich for lunch at the top of the week.

"We welcome all children with all sandwiches," he said. "It’s New York City, you can bring whatever sandwich you want."