Increasing organic consumption by school meals – lessons learned in the iPOPY project

Summary in the original language of the document

Increasingly, food consumption occurs in
out-of-home contexts, where organic food can also
have a role to play. Public food services may be
utilised to increase the sustainability of providing
nutrition. Although school meals may be well suited
to integrating organic food and sustainable nutrition
concepts, school food provision systems are very
different across Europe. This paper compares school
food provision systems and their utilisation of organic
food in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy and
Norway, discussing how various strategies and instruments
used for organic food procurement in school
meals may increase organic food consumption. Using
five analytical categories—(a) type of school food
service, (b) degree of public financing, (c) degree of
political and administrative involvement in school
food procurement in general, (d) degree of specific
support for organic school food, and (e) availability of
organic food supply adapted to school food service—
values have been assessed for each country in order to
summarise and visually display their differences.
Especially, the degree of specific support for organic
school food shows a significant relation to the actual
use of organic food in school meals. To maximise the
share of organic food in school meals, instruments
should be adapted to the actual points of departure in
each case. It is argued that strategies and instruments
designed to promote public procurement of organic
food increase the consumption of organic food in
schools and that such policies will have the greatest
impact when they are linked up with broader concepts
such as a whole-school approach and sustainable
nutrition.