Increasing organic consumption through school meals—lessons learned in the iPOPY project

Abstract

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.