New York City’s one million public school students could lunch on “cheesy garlic pizza,” green beans and salad on Monday. But not roast beef.
Patients at New York City’s public hospitals might dine on paella — seafood not included — or a Moroccan root vegetable tagine.
In New York City-run facilities, meat is increasingly missing from the menu.
Mayor Eric Adams on Monday vowed to reduce emissions tied to city food procurements by 33 percent by 2030, unveiling data showing that in New York City, food consumption rivals transportation as a source of planet-warming gases.
Every year, New York City spends roughly $300 million buying food — for public school students, for detainees on Rikers Island, and for patients admitted to its 11 public hospitals. The city estimates that its food purchases produce as much carbon as the annual exhaust from more than 70,000 gas-fueled cars. In 2021, during the last year of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, the city committed to cutting its food-related emissions by 25 percent by 2030.
Monday’s announcement increased that commitment to 33 percent.
“It is easy to talk about emissions that are coming from vehicles and how it impacts our carbon footprint, it is easy to talk about the emissions that’s coming from buildings and how it impacts our environment,” Mr. Adams said, standing next to a chef in a toque at a city hospital kitchen. “But we now have to talk about beef. And I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation.”
The announcement is the latest development in Mr. Adams’s longstanding interest in vegetarianism, but it also represents an unusually frank admission from a national political leader that Americans will have to eat differently if they want to rein in climate change.
The city for the first time released a new measure of New York City’s carbon footprint that incorporates the greenhouse emissions created by the consumption and production of food. It found that food rivals transportation in the size of its carbon footprint — at 20 percent of the city’s emissions, it trails just behind transportation, at 22 percent. New York buildings produce 34 percent of the city’s emissions.
“If you really want to make a difference, there are two main things you do for food, one of which is you try to reduce the amount of beef,” said Richard Larrick, a professor of management at Duke University.
The other is to grapple with food waste, which now largely ends up in landfills producing methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. To tackle that problem, New York City has vowed to roll out a citywide composting program by the end of 2024.
“To have 20 grams of protein from beef — that’s kind of a meal’s serving of protein, is like burning a gallon of gasoline,” Mr. Larrick said. “Everything else is less than a fifth of a gallon, essentially.”
Mayor Adams, a self-described vegan who sometimes eats fish, has long cast his plant-based diet as essential to healthy living.
He credits his abstemious diet for reversing his diabetes, and he has written a cookbook, “Healthy at Last,” which boasts recipes such as “Jackfruit and Okra Gumbo,” “Forest Bowls with Earthy Vegetables and Turmeric Cashew Sauce,” and a “Power Red Smoothie” filled with apples, berries and bananas.
He has worked with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine to give health care workers training on nutrition.
Rarely, however, has he connected a plant-based diet to issues outside of individual health, like climate change or animal welfare. (In fact, his decision to display drowned rats at Brooklyn Borough Hall when he was borough president prompted a deluge of criticism from animal rights activists who had formerly considered him an ally.)
“I always say we have two mothers: One gave birth to us, the other sustains us, and we have been destroying the one that sustains us based on the food that we have been consuming,” Mr. Adams said on Monday.
New York City schools already abstain from serving meat on Mondays and Fridays. Its public hospitals have made vegetarian dishes the default option, though patients who want meat can still get it. Mr. Adams’s announcement on Monday suggests the city will be serving even less beef at its facilities in the coming years, though it has yet to specify specific reduction targets.
In the 2021 fiscal year (the last year for which data is available), New York City bought more than $720,000 worth of Jamaican beef patties, nearly $270,000 worth of canned beef ravioli and nearly $190,000 of beef taco meat, according to a dashboard maintained by the city’s Office of Food Policy.
“Ruminant meats,” as the city categorizes beef, constitute only 1 percent by weight of the city’s food purchases. But the meat’s carbon footprint is undoubtedly larger.
Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said that beef is so carbon-intensive because it uses so much land that might otherwise host forests that store carbon.
“Beef, for example, in the American diet is like 3 percent of calories and like half of our land use,” Mr. Searchinger said. “So anything that reduces beef in particular has huge greenhouse gas benefits.”