Empowering consumers: the creative procurement of school meals in Italy and the UK

In many European countries something of a ‘moral panic’ has recently broken out around food, health and obesity. In Italy, roughly 20% of children and teenagers between the age of 6 and 17 years are overweight, and 4% of them are obese (Brescianini et al. , 2002). In the UK, where in 1999 19% of the 5-year-olds were overweight and 7% were obese (Mikkelsen et al. , 2005, p. 7), the most tangible sign of this growing concern is the Obesity Report (House of Commons, 2004). To address the devastating effects of the ‘obesity epidemic’ on national health and economy (see Fig. 1), this seminal government report emphasizes the role that public procurement can play by promoting healthy eating habits (House of Commons, 2004, pp. 68–70). To begin assessing the role of the public realm in supporting sustainable patterns of consumption that privilege ‘quality’ (i.e. local, seasonal, nutritious and fresh) food, in this paper we focus on school meals, an institution that has been propelled into the forefront of the current debate about health and well-being. Indeed, the school meal service not only constitutes an enormous market in its own right, capable to sustain quality food production systems. If, as Jackson (2004) points out, the school meal system is understood also as a system of social learning, as it should be, it affords the opportunity to promote more enlightened forms of consumer behaviour, particularly the kind of behaviour deemed necessary to make positive food choices in relation to healthy eating (Burke, 2002). To understand the scope for, and the limits to, the development of school meal systems that empower consumers by building their capacity to eat healthily, we compare two very different sociocultural environments of food choice and public procurement: Italy and the UK. While in Italy the dominant political, regulatory and cultural context explicitly encourages the implementation of pro-active public sector catering policies that prioritize local and organic foods, in the UK the numerous initiatives that are currently seeking to integrate sustainability criteria into food procurement in schools (DEFRA, 2005) still have to confront an uncertain regulatory environment in which local sourcing is perceived to be a risky and possibly illegal activity (Morgan and Sonnino, 2005). As we will show, these divergent national approaches to public food procurement represent different interpretations of a fundamentally ambiguous European macro-regulatory context, which is shaped, at the same time, by an old philosophy of free trade and by emerging ideals of sustainability. Despite their differences, however, both countries show clear signs of commitment to designing a sustainable school meal service, which we define as a service that delivers fresh and nutritious food; conceives healthy eating as part of a socially negotiated ‘whole school’ approach; and, wherever feasible, seeks to source the food as locally and as seasonally as possible. The most important vehicle for securing a sustainable school meals service is creative procurement policy , which takes a holistic view of the food chain because it recognizes that production and consumption need to be calibrated at the local level. Through creative procurement, local consumers are encouraged to appreciate the value of health and locally produced food because this is the foundation stone of a sustainable school meals service.