Zohran Mamdani's Dangerous Plot To Feed New Yorkers
Next stop, Moscow!
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed opening five municipal-run grocery stores (one in each borough). It’s a modest proposal that won’t harm a single baby, but certain people are freaking out as if five stores in a city of 10 million people would somehow end capitalism as we know it.
Gristedes and D’Agostino’s owner John Catsimatidis, a Republican who previously ran for mayor, has warned that Mamdani could turn New York into “Havana under Castro.” That seems a little over the top. Catsimatidis wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a vote for Mamdani is effectively a vote for Soviet-era bread lines, which is absurdly ahistorical. He’s also threatened to close his stores and leave New York if Mamdani wins. Andrew Cuomo has also claimed that he’ll flee to Florida if Mamdani is the next mayor. Mamdani might just solve New York’s housing problems before he’s even officially sworn into office.
Republican Rep. Michael Rulli argues that the proposal would prove a “bullet to the heart” of blue-collar America. “Once you have only government-run business, there’s no incentive for there to be creativity, competition, variety,” Rulli said. I’m not sure I’d ever apply the words “creativity” or “variety” to the average Gristedes or D’Agostino’s.
New York is a city where most people don’t have cars, so affordable supermarkets that are a reasonable walk from where you live is a necessity not a luxury. Yet, between 2005 and 2015, New York lost about eight percent of its greengrocers — defined as family-owned stores of less than 7,000 square feet.
“The rent is too high — nobody is making ‘money money,’” Catsimatidis complained in 2016, almost a decade before Mamdani ran for mayor. Gristedes had closed locations on the Upper East Side to make room for high-rise condominiums, frustrating residents. Unrestrained capitalism was clearly not looking out for the community.
New York had previously tried to convince groceries to stay open with business-friendly tax incentives. However, some developers see grocery stores as more trouble than they’re worth. The businesses generate a lot of trash and requires space for delivery trucks.
Mamdani is addressing a very real issue for New Yorkers, which seems like what a mayor should do, rather than try to avoid prosecution for his crimes, like the current Gracie Mansion resident.
“When you speak to New Yorkers—whether they’re making $40,000 or $200,000—you hear about sticker shock they feel when they go into a grocery store to buy the same item that they used to be able to easily afford a few years ago,” Mamdani told Bon Appetit in June.
“I also represent Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing development in all of North America. What I hear from so many of my constituents there is, ‘Why is it that there are five or six fast food restaurants in a five-block radius, but I can’t find anywhere where I can actually afford to buy groceries?’ What this network of municipally owned grocery stores would provide is a guarantee of cheaper groceries and a recognition that food is a non-negotiable for New Yorkers.”
It’s interesting to place Mamdani’s city-run groceries within the context of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s recent “don’t let them eat carrot cake” viral moment. Oz went on Fox News last week to commemorate Medicare’s 60th anniversary, and he promoted the right-wing lie that only shiftless deadbeats will lose coverage thanks to the GOP’s horrible new spending bill.
“We’ll be there for you when you need help with Medicare and Medicaid, but you've got to stay healthy as well. Be vital. Do the most that you can do to really live up to the potential, the God-given potential, to live a full and healthy life. You know, don’t eat carrot cake. Eat real food,” he said, after having just given Stuart Varney a carrot cake.
This is consistent Darwinian messaging from Oz. He said in May, “You heard Secretary Kennedy talk about 70% of the food being ultra-processed. Just give [kids] food that comes out of the ground. Look at the way it looks when you eat it; real food that you can recognize.”
“Real food” is not so easily attainable, especially in New York City where the ground is concrete. And even when you find a store that sells “real food” and not honey buns from 1998, the so-called “real food” isn’t cheap. Oz should know this, considering that back in 2022, when he was running for Senate, he humiliated himself in a video filmed at a local Pennsylvania grocery where he whined about the cost to assemble a crudités platter. (Watch below.)
Although it was annoying to see a multi-millionaire complain about the price for pre-made guacamole and top drawer salsa, Oz was correct that most fresh food is expensive. Before stripping people of their health care, maybe he could support programs and policies that would make groceries more affordable for everyone.
Despite the cries of communism and images of Soviet bread lines, Mamdani isn’t going to shutter Zabar’s or seize the means of Dean & DeLuca production. He wants to open five grocery stores in the more than two dozen neighborhoods that are food deserts, where snack cakes are easier to find than apples. This affects about 3 million New Yorkers, and it’s an issue that corporations and business tycoons aren’t going to solve on their own, no matter how many tax breaks we offer them. Oz should applaud Mamdani’s proposal because it will offer lower-income Americans access to fresh foods and vegetables. Yet, such solutions don’t seem to interest Oz, who views good health as both a weirdly religious (e.g. “God-given potential”) and patriotic duty.
Oz said it was Americans “patriotic duty” to stay healthy at a Make Indiana Healthy Again event in April. He repeated this line a month later on Fox News during his spiel about feeding kids fresh food you just yanked out of the ground, Farmer Jones-style: “It’s also your patriotic duty because less than a quarter of kids are eligible for the military because they’ve got underlying health issues.”
Demanding that Americans keep their children healthy so they can go fight in wars for the glory of the motherland sounds more like the Soviet Union than anything Mamdani has proposed.
The government already runs grocery stores on military bases, is that scary communism too?
"Cuomo has also claimed that he’ll flee to Florida if Mamdani is the next mayor."
I won't be the last person to say it, but that would be worth casting a vote for Mamdani in and of itself