Promoting sustainable consumption and healthy eating: A comparative study among public schools in Denmark, Germany, Finland & Italy

Summary

Since the Ottawa charter on the importance of health promotion in settings the school has been
named as one of the most important arenas for interventions to promote physical activity and
healthy eating. Especially the school food service has been the object of a change agenda that has
been named the European school food revolution. This revolution is characterized not only
attempts to promote healthy eating but also by attempts to make food supply and consumption
more sustainable by integrating organic procurement policies. The current study aims at
investigating how these two agendas work together. Do they compete or do they go hand in hand
as previous studies suggest? And if this is the case does organic food schemes at school and related
curricular activities then induce healthier eating behaviours among children? The research that is
part of the iPOPY study was conducted among school food coordinators in public
primary/secondary schools (children age from 6 to 15 years old) in Denmark, Germany, Finland and
Italy. The study was initiated in Denmark, and subsequently performed in the other three countries
through a web‐based questionnaire. The questionnaire was translated and adapted to fit the
different languages and food cultures. The questionnaire researched the attitude, policies and
serving practices regarding promoting organic foods and healthy eating habits through school food
service and classroom activities. The data suggest that schools with organic supply tend to develop
organisational environments that a more supportive for healthy eating than their non organic
counterparts. However the results were only significant for Denmark and Italy, In Germany results
were significant in some cases where as for Finland there were no differences or results were
contradictory. The findings suggest the school food revolution is driven by different agendas but
that awareness raising on nutrition and sustainability issues seems to be an important feature of
many change processes. Findings also suggest that the two agendas although separated in the
scientific literature is much more integrated in the everyday life perspective of school practitioners