WHAT I'M THINKING ABOUT MOST DAYS LATELY

I'm still in the university town and nearly all of my classmates have left for the real world, so there's not much going on to talk about. I'm doing interviews and research work these days. And not much else. Which is really cool, but writing about it now becomes blogging about work, and that's not so professional and may come back at me some day. I think actually that the content of my interviews is part of a funded research project and not even officially publishable until the project publishes larger reports. But even if it's not so, it's still specialized information that should be published for real at some point, and not on my blog.

But some of it's general procedural and policy, and within that, some of it may be worth reading about even if you're not obsessed with the details of public procurement and school, prison and hospital catering.

So, today's lesson: Creatively procuring food in the face of restrictive regulations.

I find the convoluted regulations around catering and vendor contracts pretty interesting, since mostly it involves creatively working around trade restrictions in order to be able to buy fresh, seasonally grown food that didn't fly in from Greece. There's a built-in contradition in UK policy (and that of most EU countries) in that there is an EU and UK mandate to include sustainability and environmental considerations in all government policy and legislation, but also a mandate to open all public contract tenders without trade restrictions to local or home-national contractors. This means that you cannot specify local food from local suppliers, but must allow vendors from any EU country or anywhere in your own country a fair and equal chance. So you cannot directly choose to reduce food miles and carbon emissions, or to protect agricultural jobs in your region.

So the way to reach those goals, if you wish to, is to specify things like frequent deliveries and how soon after bread is baked must it be fed to your pupils. You can also design menus to be based on foods grown seasonally in your area. So you specify in your tender criteria that food is fresh, not frozen, deliveries are flexible and/or within certain time of baking or whatever, seasonal varieties are to be used, quick response capability for extra deliveries, etc. Things that will tend to favor local suppliers, because they'll have closer access and more flexiblity and cheaper access to food that is seasonal in the area. Once a supplier has won the contract, then catering managers and buyers can work more directly, asking for what apples are cheap, in season, overstocked, etc. There's no law against it at that point.

As you might guess, this process is not one that can be built into law, though policy guidance can encourage it. Generally, it requires an activist catering or procurement official willing to put in the time, learn about the local supply chains and vendors, and reach out to potential suppliers so they know how to bid on the contracts. It's not straightforward, and it's time-consuming. It would always be easier to contract with a large catering company who'll get you the required basic nutrition at the cheapest price. (And you'd save money on labour, too--fresh food takes more time and skill than tossing chicken nuggets in the oven) And therein lies the challenge to making sustainability a part of general practice in public catering. Somehow it's got to become either so popular (and pushed for by parents) that catering officers want to do it, or built into training and job requirements such that they have no choice. Our research is based on the idea that best practice needs to be identified and disseminated to interested officers so they don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Please visit again for tomorrow's procurement dilemma: Mums pushing burgers through school railings so their kids won't be forced to eat healthy food!