Public sector’s organic target is grand, but buying Irish would be better
Fadó, fadó, when I was a toddler sent to a place that I considered a prison but my parents called creche, we got a hot meal served to us in the middle of the day. It usually consisted of cold, lumpy mashed potato with some red tomato sauce and spaghetti thrown in posing as an additional vegetable.
Invariably, I did not eat that muck and thus my renegade school career began by being held back as a threeyear-old until I ate the lumpy mash. I never did.
However, my dim view of school meals was drastically overhauled while I was filming Heated last year for RTÉ One. A creche in Louth was working with large-scale vegetable producers Meade’s, who donate any veg that isn’t considered fit for supermarket use.
We took some ‘wonky’ but perfectly edible carrots to the creche where an array of meals from carrot cake to carrot soup were created.
All in all, the creche, which was in a disadvantaged area, saved €10,000 a year by getting fresh local veg for free from places like Meade’s and invested it back into facilities such as a special chill-out room for children with autism.
It was a good news story for Irish agriculture and Irish schoolchildren, made all the more palatable by the fact that there wasn’t a lumpy smudge of cold mash and tomato sauce in sight.
So when news of the increased funding for the Hot Schools Meals programme pretty much coincided with the new 10pc organic requirement for food bought in by public sector bodies (the ‘Green Public Procurement’), I was immediately interested.
One of the things that interested me most about the 10pc organic requirement was that it was mentioned basically in the same breath as the 10pc organic target for farming in Ireland, as if it would automatically come from these new shiny organic farms.
However, when you read and reread the press release, there is no requirement for people behind the public procurement rules to source Irish organic food or even Irish food.
I did some more digging and asked the Department of Social Protection what the rules were on sourcing Irish or Irish organic food.
They replied: “…The successful service provider is to provide fresh, seasonal nutritious produce (organic where possible) — fruits, vegetables, grains, other foods — that may be new to students, keeping in line with the government’s Healthy Eating Policy and the Schools Procurement Unit’s tender documents where applicable.
“The menu is to include a range of locally sourced items along with a greater use of sustainable food, for example, in-season produce, high animal welfare standards on meat, free-range eggs, marine conservation certified fish, Fair Trade produce, produce from certified organic source…”
The issue is that all of that last part is wholly aspirational with very little
Most importantly, ‘Spaghetti tinned in tomato sauce does not count as a vegetable’
to actually bind people to it.
On top of that, I’m not sure how schools are meant to afford Fair Trade, free-range or organic produce on the budget they’re given. Schools availing of the scheme receive 75c per child for breakfast, €1.70 for lunch, €2.50 for dinner and €3.20 for a hot meal.
The Department also informed me that 316,000 pupils are eligible for Hot School Meals and overall expenditure had risen from €108.7m last year to €190.1m this year.
It is a lot of money, which I’m delighted my taxes are contributing to. Children are the future of every society and I’d like to see our future generations well fed.
However, even though I’m an organic farmer, I would much rather see a minimum requirement for 10pc or even 20pc Irish food in the public procurement scheme.
If part of the idea behind the ‘Green Public Procurement’ is to support a circular economy, then it needs to support the struggling Irish vegetable growers and other farm sectors.
Considering that the Government of Ireland’s annual public sector purchasing accounts for 10-12pc Ireland’s GDP, the Green Public Procurement could have done a lot more for Irish agriculture by adding a requirement for Irish food.
I went on a further deep dive into the nutritional specifications of the school meals programme. Despite the zero requirement for Irish food, there is plenty of simple and sound nutritional advice.
The recommended drinks for school children are either fresh water or milk, meals containing red meat should be offered at least twice a week — and most importantly, “Spaghetti tinned in tomato sauce does not count as a vegetable.”