Food, Football & Foodprints

Summary

Large scale sport events play an important role in the media landscape of today. But also the externalities attracts attention including the environment and the surroundings in which the sports events take place. This paper takes a closer look at the food part of events. It uses the upcoming sports event in Brazil as the point of departure and discusses the opportunity related to the possible greening of these events. The paper argues that food at events are important in the branding of sports events since food is beginning to play an more important role in the experience of an event and in the media landscape. Events and other large scale catering has the potential to drive the development of organic food & farming. The paper underlines that making the Brazilian sport event a “green food and meal experience” is a huge task because expectations are high and since previous events have set a high standard. Therefore international cooperation is necessary. The paper therefore suggest a transatlantic platform for cooperating on this issue between Brazil, Germany and Denmark since all countries have important core competencies. The paper address some of the important challenges relate to the greening of large scale event food service including education & training, certification & food traceability labeling and policy instruments & egulation.