It’s hard to picture a school lunch tray without chicken nuggets. But starting next summer, the breaded, bite-size childhood staple may be wiped from cafeteria menus across New York City public schools.
New food standards announced this week for nearly a dozen city agencies, including the Department of Education, will ban processed meats, create new restrictions on artificial colors and preservatives, further limit low-calorie sweeteners and aim to increase offerings of “minimally processed plant protein foods.” The standards, which go into effect in July 2026, apply to public schools and hospitals, and to agencies that serve older adults and homeless people, among others.
“When we came into office, we committed to ensuring all New Yorkers have access to healthy, fresh foods,” said Mayor Eric Adams, who has said his own health had improved after a shift to a plant-based diet. “By looking at the meals we serve, we are making New Yorkers healthier and achieving our mission of making New York City the best place to raise a family.”
What constitutes healthy eating has become increasingly politicized, from the push by Michelle Obama, the former first lady, to make school lunches healthier to the Make America Healthy Again movement spearheaded by the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Trump administration, in a departure from its predecessors, is now letting some states bar residents from using food stamps to buy soda and other items considered unhealthy.
The changes in New York City, issued by the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, aren’t the first time Mr. Adams has tried to put his mark on school lunches. In 2022, after he introduced “Vegan Fridays,” parents shared photos of their children’s lunches on social media, including prepackaged burritos, bags of Tostitos chips and apple slices. Lacking the appeal and alliteration of “Taco Tuesday,” the vegan day didn’t catch on.
Now educators and scholars say they are concerned about how the new food standards could negatively affect children’s eating habits, even if they are well-intentioned.
“It sounds good, but then when you implement it, what does it mean for kids who are used to all these fast foods from home or who are picky eaters?” said Renny Fong, the principal of Public School 130 Hernando De Soto. “If you just put healthy foods in front of them, without educating them and their families, then you might have kids who won’t eat.”
The ban on processed meat is particularly notable, considering the love that children (and many adults) have for chicken nuggets in all forms — Tyrannosaurus rexes, pterodactyls, stars, boots and circles.
Part of the appeal of chicken in the post-World War II era was that it was marketed as a healthier alternative to red meat, said Steve Striffler, the author of “Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food” and a professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
But poultry companies realized that there wasn’t much money to be made in producing whole chickens sold in supermarkets. “What they land on is not producing more chicken, but doing more to chicken — that is, increasingly having more processed chicken products,” Dr. Striffler said.
Some of the products weren’t hits — Tyson’s “giblet burger,” for example, was a flop. But with the nugget, poultry processors struck gold.
The chicken nugget was developed in the 1960s by Robert Baker, a poultry science professor at Cornell University. And then in the 1980s, the McNugget hit the market.
“By the 1980s, the chicken nugget is widely accepted as an easy-to-prepare, mass-produced convenience food that kids like,” Dr. Striffler said. “McDonald’s is at the core of this and really markets it to kids.”
Around that time, there wasn’t much concern about the healthiness of school lunches, Dr. Striffler added. “It was much more about getting kids fed,” he said.
But now politicians, parents and health officials are much more worried about what children are eating and what types of food are being purchased with public dollars.
Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration banned Red Dye No. 3 in food and beverages. The new standards in New York City include restrictions on artificial colors, emphasize serving whole foods and recommend that no foods be deep-fried, specifically mentioning chicken nuggets and mozzarella sticks. Fruit juices must be 100 percent juice, with no added sugar or sweeteners. Breads like bagels, muffins and waffles may not have more than 10 grams of added sugar per serving.
Donald W. Schaffner, chair of the food science department at Rutgers University, said that some aspects of the new standards seemed beneficial, including the call for more foods with plant-based protein. But he expressed concern over the vagueness of other rules. “What is the definition of ‘processed’ being used here?” he said. “Freezing is a process used in food science. Is a frozen meat a processed meat?”
Dr. Schaffner also expressed concerns about the potential cost of such changes. “Part of the reason why we process foods is that it helps us store them for long periods of time, which makes them an economical choice,” he said. “So I worry: If we have these restrictions placed on foods, what will that do in terms of the cost of school lunches?”
Kevin Kiprovski, the director of public policy at LiveOn NY, a nonprofit focused on senior services and aging, expressed a similar fear for older adult centers also affected by the new standards.
“We celebrate the mayor’s efforts to improve nutrition,” he said. “However, we know that providers need more funding to meet existing demands, and additional regulations may need additional funding.”
City health officials said one goal of the new standards is to target chronic illnesses, like diabetes and heart disease, and increase life expectancy. The standards will apply to more than 219 million meals and snacks served each year, the city said.
For years, Mr. Adams has been vocal, even when contradicting himself, about his personal diet and nutritional opinions. He calls himself a vegan but has also been seen eating fish in public. His TikTok debut in 2022 was a video of him blending up a swamp-water-colored smoothie as Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” played softly in the background. And in 2020, before he was mayor, he published a cookbook titled “Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses.”
Anna Kodé writes about design and culture for the Real Estate section of The Times.
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