The Seventeenth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, a city that birthed my dad, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time listening, truly you have made choices and I’m proud of you. You may wish to catch up first by listening to some of the earlier episodes, or at least the first one, or not. Don’t listen to the mayor’s podcast, it’s bad. Today, I’m talking about the 17th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E 17 Food for thought how we’re transforming the way New Yorkers eat, released October 25th, 2023. And it is the last of the backlog. Once I’ve done this one, I’m caught up and can simply wait for the next one to land, if, indeed, it ever does.

A quick peek behind the curtain: I’ve been in a fever haze listening to most of these in roughly the space of a week. This extraordinarily inessential podcast has dominated most of the hours I haven’t been at work.

And though I say inessential, I think that’s only within the context that it fails as a podcast. As a revealing portrait of the unsettling man making it, it’s incredibly essential, I cannot believe I’m one of the only people who has heard it.

And I wonder if there’ll be any more, in no small part because, as I’m writing this out, a few days ago the mayor suddenly raced home to NYC from high level meetings in DC where he was going to yell at the Biden administration and/or beg them for money to help with the migrant crisis that Adams insists is destroying a city that I keep walking around in and thinking this is pretty nice, at least until some shithead in an SUV whips around a corner too fast and nearly kills me, which happens roughly weekly. The drivers of these vehicles do not appear to be refugees. He raced home not because of a natural disaster or a blackout or a tragedy in NYC. He raced home because his chief fundraiser got raided by the FBI who are investigating whether Turkish donors with real estate interests in the city donated to Adams’ campaign, and what they might have gained for those donations.

Well I’m sure that’ll be the last time anything shady happens with regards to the mayor’s fundraising.

Let’s knock this shit out and get a beer, shall we?

The mayor’s guest for this episode is executive director of the mayor’s office of food policy, Katie Mackenzie. I’m not doing any research into any of that, I’m just pressing play because it feels right. Let’s see what happens.

Sum up what you do, says the mayor, if you’re talking to someone on the street or at a party or some guy is hitting on you.

I really should have thought to start a tally of the number of times I say yikes out loud while listening to this thing.

There’s so many different things, food policy touches food distribution, transportation, logistics, climate, schools, restaurants, etc. She works on all of it.

What is the message we want to send? asks the mayor.

We want to acknowledge that food is very personal. How it got to you, what you choose to eat, and many New Yorkers can’t make that choice.

This isn’t an answer to his question. But I don’t think he noticed. For some reason a bit of comedy that has stuck with me since I was a kid is from this standup whose name I unfortunately don’t remember. He told this joke about how once married couples get to a certain age they don’t talk to each other anymore, they just walk into rooms and sorta announce things as if it’s conversation “Oh the crossword’s clue is Pampered Pups” followed by “I don’t know why we don’t have any toilet paper in this house” and that’s the picture I’m getting here. Just two people vibing, no thoughts, just saying vague shit in each others general direction for a bit with microphones on.

The mayor asks why is it important how food gets on your plate?

She talks through all the stuff that happens for food to get from point a to point b. And knowing where it came from is very important.

Now, I think how food gets on your plate is important because of the resources that might be involved and the ways people might be harmed as a part of the coercive workforce involved in most food production, but that actually answered the question the mayor asked. I am not sure what question Mackenzie is answering.

She asks the mayor to tell her about what he did after he changed his diet, and to tell her about about his Sunday Prep Days.

The mayor, famously, claims that he cured his own diabetes with a healthy diet. He also says he’s a vegan, which is simply untrue, he eats meat all the time, plenty of people have seen it, plenty of pictures have been taken of him doing it. I bring this up because I don’t assume that the listener knows what Mackenzie means when she says the mayor changed his diet, but the mayor doesn’t inform the listener.

Sunday prep days was when he’d chop up his fruits an veggies on Sunday evenings before the week started so that he had them ready to go for the week. Mindblowing stuff, definitely glad that a significant chunk of the podcast about the city’s food policy makers is given over to the concept of meal prep.

Mackenzie says that we’re encouraging our food service workers in city run cafeterias in schools and corrections to do the same thing. We’re introducing plant based options, and encouraging them to use “cutting” and “spices” and “culinary techniques they might not have been trained on” and… again these people aren’t talking about the same stuff? That’s not what the mayor described at all when he told us about his meal prep?

We need to meet people where they are, says the mayor.

Am I having a stroke? This has the rhythm of conversation but these people aren’t conversing. It’s truly strange, I get the sense that either Mackenzie is a genius who has figured out that the way to get ahead in the Adams administration is to just free associate at him cheerfully, or she’s the only person he’s interviewed so far that is a match for his conversational style.

Talk about what’s on our plates says the mayor. Well, the city provides food to a lot of people. It’s the largest school system in the country, there’s elder care, shelters. We’re making sure that all the food we purchase is healthy and nutritious and exceeds federal health guidelines. And then we prepare those meals and put them on plates. Now let me talk about my daughter, says Mackenzie, and did I die? Is this what it feels like when you play that game where everyone takes a drink and one of them is dosed with acid and you realize you got the dosed drink and everyone else is talking normally but you can’t make sense of it? Why won’t she answer the mayor’s questions?

A kid needs 15 exposures to new food before they like it she says. What even? We’re putting caps on red meat and trying to buy from New York state providers.

This is like a tornado of statements. I cannot follow it at all. Sentence fragment shrapnel keeps burying itself in the tree I’m desperately holding onto.

We’re reducing the carbon footprint of our food by 1/3. Good, sure, please take whatever you want just let me lie down please.

The mayor used to dislike tofu and onions.

Mackenzie asks another question, she is a really forceful personality, and the mayor just goes with it. Tell us about your Wednesday night tradition. Now, to be fair, no one listens to the mayor’s podcast, so the fact that this Wednesday night thing has already been the subject of an entire episode doesn’t mean they can’t talk about it as if it wasn’t. He may not remember it himself, since he doesn’t mention it.

And Adams doesn’t get any more specific than he did last time. Every Wednesday “we” go out and feed New Yorkers. It’s rewarding.

Mackenzie says… it’s sorta like one of those word clouds you see online sometimes, but the center is like a cogent sentence and the rest of the words are just sorta partial thoughts that surround it and also it’s flying at high velocity right at your face. And so: “We are the only city that uses tax dollars to distribute food to food pantries” goes screaming by along with the words “press release” and “fruits and veggies” somehow related to it, but also I don’t think that’s true?

I’m trying to keep up but she’s started naming programs without talking about what they do. She seems nice and like a good person who wants to be doing good work, and there’s nothing really wrong with being someone who doesn’t express themselves ideally in the situation she’s in. She’s with her boss, it may make her nervous, she has to perform which makes a lot of people nervous, or she may just be the type of person who expresses themselves best using the written word. There’s no crime here, but I am pretty confused.

She talks about watersheds out of nowhere, and then Adams brings up his diabetes reversal, and then she says she testified to the US Dietary Guidelines Committee, and then Adams asks what her office is doing for equity, and then she says that her son was thrilled that his school had booths in the cafeteria and they both laugh.

How did you get started in this space asks the mayor. She was a swimmer. Went into disease prevention when her dad got cancer, became a dietician, and then she got into policy because she could do things at scale, to which Adams replies “this is a broccoli administration” and I am now absolutely sure I died when I started this episode and I am experiencing the divine.

The mayor asks, and this is both weird and a little touching, “are you happy, do you enjoy your job” and she assures him that she loves her work. The mayor says that while mortality is part of life, while we’re here we should live, and that’s it. That’s the episode.

Wow, well, ok, so what happened between the release of the previous episode on October 5th, 2023 and this one on October 25th? As always my primary sources here are the City and Hell Gate, two NYC focused news outlets that are incredible and well worth supporting. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Well, the mayor went to Mexico and then on to the Darian gap in Columbia to tell migrants not to come to New York, which didn’t do anything, and was it was a weird thing to do so he looked weird, but then he is weird, so he looked like him I guess.

Adams said that when he bought a building in Prospect heights in 1992 no one wanted to live there but that he cleaned up the neighborhood and now it’s nice there.

The Wall St Journal reported that the Adams campaign is discussing distributing tents to arriving migrants and telling them to sleep in parks.

Following an incident where a Republican member of the city council attended a rally at CUNY by students supportive of Palestine - oh with a gun, she bought a gun to the rally because she didn’t like the rally and thought bringing a gun would help - following that incident, which landed her a gun charge because you cannot bring a gun to a political rally in NYC, the mayor’s chief advisor sat down to tea with the council woman, who tweeted a picture of the two of them enjoying their bevvies, adding “we have true friends in this administration”. Good normal stuff.

Adams announced that the administration will be using AI to record robocalls in Adams’ voice in languages he doesn’t speak which is normal and not weird.

A top adviser to Adams went to migrant shelters demanding to be let in so he could look around with a bunch of cops in tow and when he was asked for ID he assaulted two guards.

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Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

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stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.