On this day in vegan history · February 4, 2022
New York City Schools Go Vegan on Fridays
The country's biggest school system put plant-based food in front of more than a million kids at once, and found out fast that scale is not the same thing as buy-in.
The facts
- Date
- February 4, 2022
- Scale
- Over 1,700 NYC public schools, more than 1.1 million students
- Built on
- Meatless Mondays (started 2019) and Meatless Fridays (added April 2021)
- Champion
- Mayor Eric Adams, in office since January 1, 2022
On February 4, 2022, New York City's public schools served their first fully vegan Friday lunch, a policy from newly inaugurated Mayor Eric Adams, a vegan who has said a plant-based diet reversed his own type 2 diabetes. The change extended an existing Meatless Mondays program, launched in 2019, and a Meatless Fridays rule added in April 2021, into a citywide vegan-focused Friday menu across more than 1,700 schools. Non-vegan alternatives like peanut butter and jelly remained available on request, and USDA rules meant milk still had to be offered with every meal, so the day was never quite as vegan as the headline suggested. Reaction split fast: officials called it a health win, students posted photos of unappetizing trays, and at least one state senator said the city hadn't thought it through.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
Plant-based meals are delicious and nutritious, which is why I previously called for vegetarian and vegan options in schools.
Mayor Eric Adams, announcing the Vegan Fridays program, February 2022
Source: ABC7 New York -
The only real meal some of our city's kids can count on is what they get @ school. This wasn't thought through.
NY State Senator Jessica Ramos, on the rollout
Source: The Counter
Why it still matters
It was the largest single-day plant-based meal rollout any U.S. school system had attempted, proof that vegan food could scale to a million trays a day, even if the execution showed how far institutional food service still had to go to make that food actually good.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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