Boston University

Mayor Thomas Menino loved food almost as much as he loved Bostonians. He loved eating it, talking about it, and arguing about it. We had a running battle about the best pastry in the North End; as an Italian, even with parents born in the U.S., he always pulled rank, preferring Modern Pastry to my favorite, Maria’s. Chefs at campaign events would invite him back to their kitchens after he had talked with pretty much everyone who showed up—a 2008 Boston Globe poll famously reported that more than half the city's then-609,000 residents had met the mayor—to sneak him something special they had made. Lydia Shire, a pioneering Boston chef, named a pizza for him at her restaurant Scampo, a modification of one she'd thrown together the night of one of his countless (okay, five) inaugurals, with pickled jalapeno and chopped broccoli rabe. "I know the mayor likes his robbie," she said one night soon after the restaurant opened, hand-serving him one from the pizza oven.

But aside from the coddling and special treatment any mayor who shows up gets, Menino cared about food for exactly the reasons today's food-movement activists do, and long before it was fashionable to embrace what food can and should mean: access to fresh produce for everyone of every income level; gardens as ways to unite and repair communities; and, most importantly, fresh food as a route to better health. The mayor told everyone, including his biographer, longtime Atlantic senior editor Jack Beatty, that he wanted to be remembered as "the public-health mayor." That made him work particularly closely with my spouse, John Auerbach, who served 10 years as Boston's health commissioner.

Menino was a city councilor when he helped Gus Schumacher, then the Massachusetts commissioner of food and agriculture, launch a program to help WIC recipients double the value of their food coupons if they spent them on fresh produce. Launched at the Roslindale farmer's market one Saturday in August 1986, the program, which became known as Bounty Bucks, gained traction not only across the state but eventually at the federal level. As the Double Value Coupon Program, it is active at 350 farmer’s markets nationwide in 21 states and Washington, D.C., and helped give rise to the “fruit and vegetable prescription program,” which pays doctors and nutritionists to help tailor healthier diets for overweight and obese patients and redeem “prescription” coupons for fresh produce at participating supermarkets and farmer’s markets. The mayor helped launch that, too, with Boston hospitals.

Before the term “food deserts” entered the lexicon, Menino was one of the country’s first mayors to work hard to attract supermarkets to low-income neighborhoods. In a talk at Tufts University on Food Day in 2011, he said he was proud to have opened 25 new supermarkets in Boston, particularly in areas full-service supermarkets hesitated to go. They didn’t always succeed. Three years ago Menino fought to keep Walmart out of Roxbury, by then a certified food desert, even though a locally owned supermarket he had worked hard to attract had pulled out for lack of business. He saw Walmart as a threat to local ownership and the ambitious redevelopment plans he had put into place, which are now coming to fruition. (And Walmart still isn’t in Boston.)

He did, however, favor the replacement of a failed Latino supermarket in Jamaica Plain by Whole Foods, despite the strong opposition of activist groups that claimed to represent poor and ethnic residents and that viewed its arrival as the last nail in the coffin of gentrification. Gentrification was well under way and had been for years--and the longtime urban pioneers who had moved to JP decades before in fact welcomed its arrival, as I told Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb in a conversation on Thursday at the Washington Ideas Forum just when the news broke of the mayor’s death. Menino used various city funds to shore up the Latino bodegas that remained in the neighborhood, which still has a strong Latino presence. Whole Foods didn’t create a local housing fund to offset rising rents its presence would cause, as activists had wanted; but it did keep its promise to stock a lot of Latino fruits and vegetables in the produce department of its relatively small—and constantly crowded—store.