What is it about New York mayors and their weird obsession with micromanaging what's on people's plates?

We had Michael Bloomberg, who snatched the salt shakers off the tables in New York's famous diners, and banned Big Gulps, which must have been anathema for New York's great art critic, Jerry Saltz, who makes no bones about liking them.

Now we have Eric Adams, whose response to Bloomberg is "hold muh vegan beer."

Here's him pontificating about what he thinks belongs on New Yorkers' plates, from Grabien:

EXCERPT:

ADAMS: "All food is not created equal. The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crisis lies in meat and dairy products. A plant-powered diet is better for your physical and mental health and I am living proof of that, but the reality is that thanks to this new inventory, we're finding out it is better for the planet."

Now, there's no objection to the fact that a plant-based diet (vegetarian minus junk food) actually is good for you.  It is a very good diet...among many very good diets.  And any diet will work if you stick to it, which is where most people fall off the rails.

It's also generally cheaper, given the price of meat these days in New York and the fact that you can actually grow it, even on a rooftop or community garden, and pay nearly nothing.  (I have more glorious hand-grown kale and arugula these days than I know what to do with, made gargantuan and abundant based on the torrents of rain that has blessed Southern California.)

What's obnoxious is that Adams says it's the only diet as mayor of America's largest and most diverse city — where some cultures like a lot of meat (Brazilians, Argentines, Koreans, Mongolians), some cultures like just a little meat (Mediterraneans), and some like none (many South Asians).  None of these cultures is famous for its fat people.  So for Adams to tout a one-size-fits-all diet is unseemly.  Whatever happened to "celebrate diversity"?

And while we are at it, where does he stand on bug consumption, which some climate activists are trying to promote?  Bugs are "meat," after all.  Is Adams all in for "save the bugs"? 

And here's another one: meat is out.  Climate activists are now targeting rice, a staple food that feeds three billion people, as the bad guy, calling that the biggest polluter, instead of cows and their farts.  If Adams cuts out rice, too, to save the planet, what the hell is he going to eat?  The point here is that climate science is ever shape-shifting on what's good for the Earth, which doesn't work on the matter of eating, which must be done two or three times a day.

What's even more obnoxious is that he's working as mayor to make sure that his idea of a good diet is the only diet New Yorkers can get their hands on.

According to Gothamist:

During his tenure, the city's public hospital system has made plant-centric foods its default offering for patients. Public schools last year added a second day of vegan offerings — although initial reviews were not great.

This sounds terrible just for medical reasons, given that some patients are going to require significant protein just to get well.

As for the vegan entries in schools, well, here's what they end up getting:

LaTonya: I have two kids in the same public school in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. I'm a vegetarian, they both mostly eat vegetarian meals. Both of my kids came home so upset. It was like chickpeas that were runny and green and a taco. They were like — What was it? "The water stained the table." It was pretty awful. Then their school sent a letter letting parents know that most of the kids do not eat lunch. They needed to make sure that they sent their kids to school with lunch.

I'm also a vegan Friday, so I think it's great, but it has to be appetizing. Then I just worry about the lower-income kids who rely on the school lunch to eat for the day, we have to keep on giving them an option that they will eat-

Brian Lehrer: That they will actually eat.

LaTonya: — and veganism does not have to be nasty. [crosstalk] have to be nasty.

I believe it was writer Megan McArdle who noted in her book, The Up Side of Down, that obtaining utterly fresh, green, vegetable foods for these kinds of diets is costly and often physically impossible on an industrialized scale with large numbers of such meals to be served every day, and New York City is just that, feeding more than 900,000 kids each day in its system.  That explains the green chick peas, as well as the problems seen with Michelle Obama's healthy school lunch programs, which targeted childhood obesity earlier.  It was a noble aim but logistically and fiscally impossible to do on a huge scale, and everyone involved here ought to have known that.

What's worse, now that Adams has got a captive audience of kids and hospital patients, neither of which can say "no" to his eat-your-peas plan, he's got a bigger, more Orwellian plan in place to track every bite New Yorkers eat and measure their carbon footprint from it:

The Adams administration has announced a plan to begin tracking the carbon footprint created by household food consumption as well as a new target for New York City agencies to reduce their food-based emissions by 33% by the year 2023.

Mayor Eric Adams announced the plan on Monday along with the Mayor's Office of Climate & Environmental Justice as part of the city's ongoing pledge to reduce the impact of climate change. At the same event, the Mayor's Office of Climate & Environmental Justice published a new chart in the city's annual greenhouse gas inventory that publicly tracks the carbon footprint created by household food consumption — primarily generated by meat and dairy products.

There's actually a website for this supposedly going in (I still don't see it yet).

That's the beginning of a China-style social credit system, which is as disturbing as it gets.  We all know that Adams was whooping it up with the operators of that Chinese police station — but who could have imagined that it was about importing China's Big Brother nation practices to New York?

Not a problem for Adams, though, who, though he touts a plant-based vegan diet for everyone else, makes sure he helps himself to some fish on the side.

WNYC's Brian Lehrer reports:

These are, of course, thanks to our new mayor, Eric Adams, who's an avowed vegan, but maybe he's not 100% vegan. Maybe you saw yesterday's news about a pretty fishy report on his veganism. More on that in a second. Adams has been promoting a plant-based diet, which he says helped him overcome type two diabetes a few years ago. He even wrote a cookbook. Did you know that Eric Adams wrote a cookbook a 224-page book on his plant-based diet that came out a couple of years ago? ...

As your calls are coming in on the topic of varying degrees of vegan, it was a restaurant employee apparently who revealed to Politico this weekend that our vegan Mayor orders the fish when he goes out to that restaurant. He's not a vegan, he's a pescatarian. The whistleblower reporter said a pescatarian is somebody who eats a lot of fish. After days of silence on fish gape, Adams finally came clean on the issue at a news conference yesterday, where he also did a vegan chili demonstration. Here's 20 seconds.

Mayor Eric Adams: I'm the Mayor of the City of New York and I'm perfectly imperfect. Ignore the noise. Don't worry about what's on Mayor Adams plate. Put these items on your plate because I'm living a healthier lifestyle. I'm encouraging New Yorkers to have as many plant-based meals as possible.

This is the old Soviet nomenklatura dynamic back in action alongside the emerging social credit system.  Fish for me, but not for the peasants. 

That's beyond obnoxious.  Adams's pontificating is revolting in light of that news.  He's nothing but a guy who likes power — the power to eat meat and fish himself, and insist on none for you.

Image: Screen shot from Grabien video.