Abstract
Aims:
When approaching school meal systems, different concepts can guide the design of the food preparation and serving activities. This paper presents a government-planned intervention concept of 40 days of free school meals. The argument behind this intervention was to kick-start the implementation of healthy school meal systems in Danish schools. This paper argues that the initiative (in reality) invited the establishment of a service system concept, which dominated the initiative and led to a lack of involvement of important key players needed in health promotion.
Methods:
The method used for data collection was semi-structured, qualitative interviews.Results: The main results from a systematic examination of the 35 participating schools show that the systems were mainly organized with external suppliers, and only a few of the 35 schools succeeded in establishing a user-paid school meal system afterwards.
Conclusions:
The established meal systems contained a lack of embedding factors, which is pointed to as one of the main challenges to a user-financed school meal system. The experiences of these 35 participating schools show that a period of free school meals is not a sustainable tool for achieving the goal of establishing new, healthy and user-paid school meals.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Perspectives in Public Health |
| Volume | 131 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Pages (from-to) | 280-282 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| ISSN | 1757-9139 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- implementation
- school meal systems
- user involvement