New York City public school students will soon no longer see processed meats on their lunch menus. The same goes for meals served in shelters, jails, public hospitals and other city agencies.
The changes, which take effect on July 1, are the results of a recent update to the city’s health food standards, which will also restrict artificial colors and certain sweeteners.
Acting city Health Commissioner Dr. Michelle Morris recently discussed the new standards with All Things Considered host Sean Carlson.
Here is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Carlson: So what prompted these changes to the city’s food standards?
Morris: Well, first and foremost, New York City and the New York City Health Department, specifically, really set the standard for the nation back in 2008 when these food standards were first established. We update them just about every two years because, as you can imagine, the food landscape is constantly changing. They’re always new products, and they’re also often new opportunities to integrate nutritious foods into our food standards. So we do update them regularly, and make sure that they actually meet the mark of what consumers might be seeing. And what people across New York City might be eating.
When I was in high school, what I ate everyday for lunch was not healthy at all. I drank a bottle of Kiwi strawberry Snapple every day. Probably a bag of chips. Fries. Curly fries. These were all things that I could get in my school cafeteria. Are those kinds of things still possible under the new guidance?
Our goal is not necessarily to take out all of the fun foods by any means, but it is to really make sure that the foods that are offered across those over 200 million meals provided annually are as healthy as possible. So you won’t find that everything has changed necessarily. You will find that we encourage whole or minimally processed plant protein and protein foods, things like beans, nuts, seeds, etc. You’ll also find these food standards encourage things like fruits and vegetables and whole grains and healthy proteins. So the goal really is to emphasize and make those kinds of foods even more accessible and freely accessible in order to lower the rates of chronic disease across the city.
One of the main selling points for processed meals like frozen pizza or chicken nuggets is that they just need to be heated up and they can be ready in a few minutes. I feel like these changes require more, dare I say, cooking. Are our public kitchens staffed and equipped to do all that?
I will admit that you’re right. It can be a little bit harder to make the healthier foods, quite frankly. And at the same time, part of what we do in the New York City Health Department is we offer technical assistance and partnership with many of the agencies across the city that are responsible for delivering these 219 million meals and snacks every year.
And part of the way that we do that is to try to help them find efficiencies and approaches that make it easy and not too challenging to meet the food standards. However, we also acknowledge that often the healthier foods and the foods that meet these very rigorous food standards can be both more expensive and more time consuming. However, we believe that that is an investment worth making, particularly for our kids.
How is the health department going to monitor compliance in all of this? And is it gonna be monitoring health outcomes, too?
Absolutely. We do both. We work with all of the agencies that deliver these meals. They report to us on their compliance with the food standards. And that is a relatively rigorous process. We wouldn’t say it’s overly onerous, but it does allow us to make sure that all of our sister agencies are complying with these food standards. And then the health department’s bread and butter is both prevention and data, using data to drive healthy outcomes for the city.
And so part of our goals right now actually is for us to get to a life expectancy of 83 years by 2030. This is through our Healthy NYC campaign. And as a part of that campaign, that’s exactly what we do. We monitor rates of chronic disease, cancer, and lots of other specific health issues to make sure that we are heading overall as a city in the right direction and that we are shaping our food environment in a way that, again, makes the healthy choice the easy choice.
Shifting gears here, commissioner. Harlem recently experienced a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. Experts tie the disease to naturally occurring bacteria in water-cooling towers. But how come we routinely see outbreaks in lower income communities and aren’t those outbreaks preventable?
We have been focusing all of our time, this past month or so on really understanding, investigating, and trying to protect (people) and prevent any further spread of Legionella (the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease). I’m happy to say first and foremost that we were able to close our investigation of the Legionella cluster in central Harlem as of Friday, Aug. 29, because we haven’t had anyone with symptoms more recently than Aug. 9.
There’s no one reason why we see this pattern of Legionella really impacting communities of color and low-income communities like central Harlem and the Bronx. Part of it is due to the long-lasting legacy of structural racism and disinvestment in communities of color, which impacts many things in those communities, including the fact that there is an unfair burden of chronic diseases.
That increases your risk of getting sick from Legionella. Another thing that is driving this pattern is, there’s a very high density of people in those neighborhoods and there’s also a high concentration of tall buildings with cooling towers. All those things combined likely lead to this pattern that we see. But we have announced some new initiatives that we expect will decrease the risk of legionella clusters. We’re looking forward to talking more about that at the upcoming city council hearing.
Finally, commissioner, a lot of local providers are still figuring out what their policies are around COVID shots. There’s also, frankly, been a lot of confusion and mixed messages from Washington on that. For New Yorkers who do want to get a COVID booster shot this fall, what should they know?
First and foremost, I am very, very happy that there are a lot of New Yorkers who want to get the COVID vaccine. That is awesome. And I congratulate them for caring about it and keeping it on their radar and prioritizing their health. The second thing I wanna say is that there’s no new data that’s been presented in the past several months that has us at all concerned that there are any safety issues at all with the COVID vaccines.
They are still safe and effective, and that has not changed. And then the third thing I’ll say is that we’re working very actively right now actually, on guidance to pharmacies, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers to make sure that everyone who wants a COVID vaccine can get one and can find it easily and access it easily.
That was New York City’s acting health commissioner, Dr. Michelle Morris. Commissioner, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you, Sean.