(Credit: MFA Blog)

A New York City elementary school became the first public school in the nation to go completely vegetarian when it stopped serving meat in its cafeteria this year.

Flushing’s P.S. 244 consists of about 400 students between kindergarten and third grade. And the staff say that the school lunches — which include options like black bean quesadillas, brown rice, falafel, roasted red potatoes, and tofu — are a hit among those young kids, some of whom have started requesting similar foods at home:

“It’s been a really great response from the kids, but they also understand it’s about what is the healthiest option for them,” principal Bob Groff told ABCNews.com. “Because we teach them throughout our curriculum to make healthy choices, they understand what is happening and believe in what we’re doing too.”

When the school opened in 2008, they started serving vegetarian meals three days a week. The campus became a vegetarian test kitchen for the city, Groff said. [...]

The recipes were a hit, Groff said, prompting the school to expand its meat-free meals to four days a week and then adopting a 100 percent vegetarian kitchen in January.

“The big thing I would like people to know is, this isn’t just about a vegetarian menu,” Groff said. “It’s about living a healthy lifestyle and educating students on what options are out there.”

When P.S. 224 first opened, school officials noticed many students bringing their own vegetarian lunches from home, inspiring administrators to experiment with some meat-free menus. Now that the cafeteria is totally vegetarian, students are of course still welcome to pack lunches that include meat. The cafeteria food adheres to the USDA’s standards for school lunches, so students receive the recommended levels of nutrients and protein.

School cafeterias have become critical battlegrounds in the fight to address childhood obesity, which has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Encouraging healthy eating habits among younger children has been a particular area of interest for First Lady Michelle Obama and her ongoing “Let’s Move” campaign. But public health policies in this space have been met with significant resistance, both from powerful food corporations and from conservative critics of government overreach. Significantly, however, the cities with the most aggressive nutrition policies are the same ones that have seen the biggest drops in their childhood obesity rates.

Vegetarian options tend to be healthier in part because of the health risks posed by the U.S. meat industry. Over half of the meat sold in this country contains bacteria that can’t be treated with antibiotics. Chicken and ground beef are the two most dangerous types of meat, since they’re most likely to send Americans to the hospital with a foodborne illness.

Led by public health crusader Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), New York City has taken some serious steps to crack down on smoking rates. After instituting the highest cigarette tax in the nation and banning smoking in public places, the city’s smoking rates plummeted. But Bloomberg didn’t stop there. Within the past month, he has also pushed to hike cigarette prices even further and ban public cigarette displays in stores — and now, yet another anti-smoking initiative may prevent New Yorkers under the age of 21 from purchasing cigarettes.

The policy is being spearheaded by both the city’s health commissioner and the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn (D), as yet another method of keeping tobacco products out of the hands of New York City’s youth. Although Quinn opposed Bloomberg’s recent initiative to limit the sale of large sugary drinks, she emphasized at a press conference on Monday that she admires the mayor’s other public health policies. “The mayor probably has the most effective public health agenda of any mayor in history in the United States,” Quinn said. “This is another example of moving that aggressive public health agenda forward.”

If approved, New York City would be the biggest city to enact the nation’s highest smoking age. The Boston suburb of Needham, MA has also raised its smoking age to 21 years old. The smoking age is 19 in four states — Alabama, Alaska, New Jersey and Utah — and a handful of counties, and 18 throughout the vast majority of the country.

Advocates of the proposed measure point to some studies that project raising the smoking age to 21 could cut smoking rates among 18-to-20-year-old Americans by more than half. It could particularly help deter the rates in New York City, since 80 percent of the current smokers in the city say they picked up the habit before they turned 21. “If we can prevent our youth from starting smoking before they’re 21, we may just be able to protect an entire generation from a lifetime of being addicted to the world’s most dangerous drug. We think this is going to work,” Dr. Thomas Farley, New York’s health commissioner, said.

Tobacco kills an estimated 7,000 New Yorkers each year. On a national scale, tobacco-related illnesses kill an estimated 450,000 Americans each year, contributing to about $96 billion in total annual public and private health care expenditures caused by smoking. Despite the undisputed negative health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry continues to target its products to American youth.

In New York City, the public school students who attend classes in a building owned by the Catholic Church can’t actually attend all of their classes there. As the New York Daily News reports, students need to leave campus in order to receive state-mandated instruction on sexual health, as part of a long-standing agreement between Church officials and the city’s public school district that has recently come to light.

New York state law requires sex ed classes to include information about condoms, birth control, and HIV and STD transmission, and those standards were strengthened specifically for New York City’s public school district under a new citywide standard enacted in 2011. So far, those initiatives have been wildly successful, and New York City’s teen pregnancy rate has plummeted by more than 25 percent over the past decade.

But Church officials say that type of comprehensive sex ed instruction violates Catholic doctrine. In Catholic-affiliated schools, students are taught abstinence-only education with no mention of contraceptive methods — and at least in New York City, the Church’s influence can even impact public schools’ ability to teach sex ed.

The Catholic Church is one of the biggest landowners in New York City, and leases about 40 buildings to the city’s Department of Education. That financial arrangement is attractive to the Church at a time when enrollment in private Catholic schools is declining, and Church officials see no reason to change their sex ed policy. “It is an arrangement that has been working well for both sides for years, and one we intend to continue,” Diocese of Brooklyn spokeswoman Stefanie Gutierrez told the New York Daily News.

Some public school students disagree. Tayshawn Edmonds, a 15-year-old who attends El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Williamsburg, has to walk 15 minutes off campus to attend his sex ed classes. “The church owns the building, so they call the shots,” he explained. “But I don’t see why they get to control what we’re doing at our school.”

The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception persists into the realm of higher education, too. Across the country, Catholic-affiliated colleges are still fighting against an Obamacare provision that requires insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control, even though there’s already an exception for the religious institutions who object to covering contraceptives. And at Boston College — which is a Jesuit institution — school officials are threatening disciplinary action against students who distributed condoms as part of a safe sex campaign.