Promoting Organic Food in Public Catering: A Theory Based Approach to Sustainable Public Catering Systems

Summary

The paper focuses on public catering as a significant service provider in the modern society and a potential large scale user of organic food. In order to argue for the use of organic food by public catering, the traditional nutrition oriented public catering is reframed and repositioned as sustainable public catering system, responsible in mediating the well-being of both bio-physical environment and individual consumers. The repositioning is based on theory of ecological communication within social systems by Niklas Luhmann. The development towards sustainable public catering systems is examined by analysing Danish and Finnish public catering cases, which make visible the role of economy, law, science, politics and education in contextual networks governing public catering. This theoretically based approach confirms the networks and their mutual communication as bearing on the use of organic food, rendering public catering organisations ‘centres of sustainability’ in every-day life of (post)modern citizens.