Opportunities for and Limits to Cooperation between School and Families in Sustainable Public Food Procurement

Abstract

This paper describes a research project carried out in an Italian public school to assess whether parents were willing to take part in food procurement decisions, as well as their ability to accurately predict what foods children would pick at school lunch and their propensity to support sustainable food choices made by the school. The methodology included a questionnaire to 500 parents and an in-depth study of 138 child/parent pairs. The study comprised: (i) presentation of an innovative recipe in the weekly menu of the school canteen; (ii) meal observations of children’s intake at school lunch during the week of the menu modification; (iii) collection of both parents’ and children’s reports on their choices of recipes from the modified weekly menu. The results are commented in light of two important changes that have recently affected Italian public school food procurement: the opening of school canteens to lunches brought from home and the measures adopted since 2020 to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. Both events go in the direction of delegating to parents the multifaceted role of the school in the food arena. The article concludes that the results of the study should discourage this approach.

Research for Rural Development 2022 : annual 28th International scientific conference proceedings

“…It has been observed that food brought from home and breakfasts in the classroom generate less food waste in the school canteen (Farris et al, 2019); however, the schoolchildren who ate snacks high in saturated fat or calories in the morning, which cause loss of appetite at noon, were more likely to waste lunch food (Falasconi et al, 2015;Martins et al, 2020). School lunch food is adequate for schoolchildren's daily diet and is generally more nutritious than other foods, including those taken from home (Pagliarino, Santanera, & Falavigna, 2021). Schoolchildren eating habits are extremely different, as it could be associated with the regularity of meals, the kind of breakfast, even the age at which schoolchildren start smoking (Park, Choi, & Kim, 2015), as well as their appetite (Martins et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2019), as food is wasted more when the schoolchildren are not hungry (Betz et al, 2015) or are not satisfied with the taste of the food served (Qian et al, 2021;Talwar et al, 2021) or other sensory properties of the food (Tuorila et al, 2015;Martins et al, 2020).…”

Analysis of factors affecting zero-waste food consumption in schools

“…It has been observed that food brought from home and breakfasts in the classroom generate less food waste in the school canteen (Farris et al, 2019); however, the schoolchildren who ate snacks high in saturated fat or calories in the morning, which cause loss of appetite at noon, were more likely to waste lunch food (Falasconi et al, 2015;Martins et al, 2020). School lunch food is adequate for schoolchildren's daily diet and is generally more nutritious than other foods, including those taken from home (Pagliarino, Santanera, & Falavigna, 2021). Schoolchildren eating habits are extremely different, as it could be associated with the regularity of meals, the kind of breakfast, even the age at which schoolchildren start smoking (Park, Choi, & Kim, 2015), as well as their appetite (Martins et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2019), as food is wasted more when the schoolchildren are not hungry (Betz et al, 2015) or are not satisfied with the taste of the food served (Qian et al, 2021;Talwar et al, 2021) or other sensory properties of the food (Tuorila et al, 2015;Martins et al, 2020).…”