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The purpose of this paper is to examine the decision to contract school meal services and the associated nutritional and financial impacts on school districts. Given the increase in the use of competitive contracting of public school meal services and the critical role that school meal services play in public health, this is an important subject to investigate.

A case study was performed using one US school district with privatized food service. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with school food service decision makers. Other data collection included the analysis of public documents such as the school district’s budgets and financial statement reports (the cost per lunch and breakfast meals, the cost for labor, contract, transport, supplies and food expenses) and school food service policies (contract policies). Supplementary data pertaining to district social-demographic profiles and full-time equivalent enrollment figures were also collected from state departments.

Analysis of interviews revealed that positive financial motivations and impacts were dominant factors related to contracting food services in the district. A significant finding was the relatively short turnaround in the district’s negative financial situation as a result of contracting out the food services. These findings provide valuable insight and support for rural school districts in similar negative financial situations seeking to contract out food services.

Many studies have examined contracting out of technical services, such as transport and waste management, and social services, such as correctional services and health; however, there is a lack of studies documenting the effects of contracting out of school meal services.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the good manufacturing practices in meal services in public schools and day care centres in Baixada Santista, Brazil using a health risk classification.

A total of 59 public schools and day care centres in nine municipalities of Baixada Santista – Brazil were randomly selected. The sanitary conditions were evaluated by applying a validated checklist specific to school meal service. The questions were scored according to the health risks detected. A percentage of conformity to good manufacturing practices was calculated, than schools and day care centres were classified according to health risk in relation to the scores obtained for each thematic area addressed in the checklist and in relation to the overall score.

It was observed that 62 per cent of the schools were classified as average health risk failing to comply with Brazilian legislation on food safety rules. The thematic areas that showed lower percentage of conformity to good manufacturing practices were: hand hygiene (33.9 per cent), pest control (3.4 per cent), food handlers (62.4 per cent) and food hygiene (65.4 per cent). The school meal service of day care centres presented higher conformity in the hand hygiene (p<0.01) and the environmental sanitation (p<0.05) than elementary schools.

The data observed in our study highlight the need of an effective system to monitor and evaluate the hygienic sanitary conditions in Brazil. The implementation of HACCP system may be an option with good potential to produce safer meals in school environment, nevertheless, the prerequisite program must be implemented first. Professionals with expertise in food safety can act as consultants to the school meal service and may use the data from this study as a benchmark for interventions.

This paper contain new information related the state food safety practices of Brazilian school meal service. It also presents the use of scores to determine risk. The use of health risk is a novel way to evaluate the food safety practices in school meals facilitating the implementation of corrective measures.

This study aims to gain an understanding from parents and teachers about the types of food provision practices and venues, and the food-related policies and rules in primary schools in Australia; and investigate any differences in the presence of policies and rules based on the school location and school type.

Data were collected via two online surveys from August 2019 to March 2020. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyse quantitative responses. Respondents' written responses to food-related policies were categorised into groups.

The two most common food provision services were canteen and lunch order services (mentioned by 72 and 55% of respondents, respectively). Of the 425 respondents whose schools had a canteen (parents and teachers together), 62% reported their school implements a healthy school canteen policy. Significantly more parents compared to teachers, and more respondents from government schools compared to non-government schools stated that their school had implemented such a policy. Approximately half of the respondents (47%) stated their school had implemented other food-related policies and/or rules. These policies or rules belonged to four categories: avoiding certain foods, avoiding food sharing, avoiding food packages and promoting healthy eating.

This study shows the disparities exist in implementing food-related policies among primary schools in Australia. Nutrition promoters and policy planners should consider these results and find the best mechanisms to minimise the gaps in policy implementation.

A school canteen can serve as an important setting for nutrition and health promotion. The purpose of this paper is to describe secondary school students’ perceptions of Indian school canteens.

Convenience sampling informed the recruitment of 1,026 year 9 students from nine private schools in Kolkata, India, and data were collected through self-completion of paper-based questionnaires. Frequencies and χ² analyses were computed.

The school children reported that energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods like French fries (90.4 per cent), pizza (79.5 per cent) and cakes (69.2 per cent) were frequently available in the school canteens. However, only a few students (10.2 per cent) acknowledged the availability of nutritious foods like fruits. Only a small proportion of students were content with the nutritional quality of food supplied in the canteens (3.6 per cent), the cost of food (8.7 per cent) and availability of fresh foods like fruits (5.5 per cent). The provision of healthy foods in the school canteen was supported by two-thirds of the respondents (65.9 per cent); however, only a small proportion (18.3 per cent) supported the restriction of fried foods in school canteens.

These findings underscore the need for the design and implementation of healthy school canteen policies to foster healthy eating habits among Indian adolescents.

This is the first cross-sectional survey to investigate the views of adolescents regarding school food services in the Indian context.

This article aims to examine lay‐persons' views of school food services in Victoria, Australia.

A cross‐sectional postal questionnaire survey of a random sample of electors on the Electoral Roll in Victoria, Australia. Out of 1,000 potential respondents, 377 completed the questionnaire. Main outcome measures included responses to closed questions about foods supplied to children at school using five‐point scales. Data analyses included frequency and cross‐tabulation analyses, and multivariate analyses of principal component scores by demographic and personal values variables.

Many respondents were critical of children's school food services but they were generally supportive of food and health education, whilst holding ambivalent attitudes towards snacks and marketing practices.

This was a cross‐sectional survey with a relatively low response rate.

Understanding of laypersons' views of children's food services is likely to facilitate nutrition communication and promotion of healthy children's foods.

Lay views of children's food provision have rarely been reported, despite their importance for the support of public nutrition policies. The study identifies likely antecedents of lay people's views.

The provision of nutritious food to children in full day care pre‐schools is essential to ensure adequate child growth and development. The purpose of this paper is to outline the development of a nutrition assessment tool (scored evaluation form (SEF)) for this setting, and describe the nutrition practice findings measured by this tool in full day child care in Ireland.

This study involved two phases: first, a comprehensive literature review carried out on each criterion in the SEF to ensure best practice; and second, use of the SEF in full day care pre‐schools to assess their nutrition practice.

Use of the SEF demonstrated that portion sizes provided to infants and toddlers were inadequate. Poor provision of iron containing, vegetable and dairy foods was noted, as were poor meal time practices. The phrasing of certain criteria needs modification to avoid misinterpretation of portion size.

With small modifications to clarify the portion size provided, the SEF can be used in the pre‐school setting to ascertain nutrition practice.

The SEF requires testing to determine its utility as an intervention tool whereby its use may lead to positive changes in nutrition practice in the pre‐school setting.

This paper outlines the development of a nutrition practice assessment tool for the full day child care setting in Ireland and describes previously unknown data gathered using this tool.

Few states or local school districts mandate a minimum time for lunch. With increasing pressure on schools to maximize instructional time, many US students have witnessed continued reductions in the time allotted to lunch periods and, thus, less time to choose from an increasing number of food options. This study aims to investigate middle and high school students’ preferences regarding the time available for school lunches and whether the amount of time would affect their food choice preferences.

This study investigated students’ self-reported lunchtime constraints and food choice preferences through a paper-and-pencil survey. The categorical and ratio responses were analyzed using ordinal logistic regression.

Students responded that they rarely had enough time to eat school lunch and that the lunch line waiting time strongly or very strongly influenced their food choices. For the students for whom time available for lunch and time in the lunch line influenced what they ate, they were more likely to prefer limited food choices in several categories of the school lunch menu.

Foodservice professionals who wish to actively promote better nutrition might consider practical ways to reduce the foodservice wait time for students. While making healthier default options (e.g. a fruit or fresh vegetable side) could increase service convenience, time required for students to make informed meal choices should not be compromised.

Because lunch line waiting time is related to students’ food choices, schools need to review the number and types of food choices offered in terms of whether they encourage students to make more healthful choices. This study offers a unique perspective on the relationship between time and individual food choices in the school lunch environment and how this relationship affects the quality of children’s diets and their eating behaviors.

The aim of this study is to identify the methods used by providers to evaluate their food services and identify elements of their service that would benefit from adopting a benchmarking system.

In‐depth interviews were conducted with 26 food services providers and key informants in day‐care settings in Surrey.

Few providers formally evaluated their service provision and most had not considered benchmarking their services against other food service providers. Factors such as food variety, food quality, cost and environment have been identified as issues that could be benchmarked and may benefit from the adoption of this process.

The study was conducted only in one country – in the UK – further research is needed into the evaluation practices of other local authorities. The benchmarking model that has been developed by the authors needs to be applied in a food service setting to establish its usefulness to food service managers.

A model has been developed from the outcome of this research, which could aid evaluation processes for food service providers to identify aspects of the service in need of improvement.

There has been little research conducted on the evaluation of food service provision for older people, especially for congregate meals. This paper provides a model, that food service providers may find useful, to identify areas of their food services that are suitable for benchmarking.

The purpose of this paper is to construct and describe a snack service model for a comprehensive school.

Empirical data were collected from the school officials and the pupils by using a focus group method in two comprehensive schools. Moreover, the food service managers of Espoo and Vantaa cities' catering services were theme interviewed. Consequently, a description of the snack service models was conducted and a snack service model for a comprehensive school was constructed.

A constructed model for serving snacks consists of eight elements: snack products; service process; customers; pricing; procurement of snacks; nutrition recommendations; in‐house control and interest groups.

The constructed snack service model can be utilized as a standard model when serving snacks in a comprehensive school.

The constructed model may act as a reference model for the school catering organisations and the school officials when decisions related to snacks serving are made.

This ethnographic study of school food service employees at an elementary, middle, and high school in the Midwest introduces “feeding labor,” a concept to signify a form of gendered labor that entails emotional and bodily feeding activities.

This chapter is based on 18 months of participant-observation and 25 in-depth interviews.

I illustrate three characteristics of feeding labor: (1) the physical labor of attending to the feeding needs of customers, (2) the emotional labor of managing feelings to create and respond to customers, and (3) variations in the gendered performance of feeding labor as explained through the intersection of race, class, and age. These dimensions vary across different field sites and emerge as three distinct patterns of feeding labor: (1) motherly feeding labor involves physical and emotional attentiveness and nurturing with mostly middle- and upper-class young white customers, (2) tough-love feeding labor involves a mix of tough, but caring respect and discipline when serving mostly working- and lower-middle class racially mixed young teens, and (3) efficient feeding labor involves fast, courteous service when serving mostly working- and middle-class predominantly white teenagers.

These findings show that a caring and nurturing style of emotional and physical labor is central in schools with white, middle-class, young students, but that other forms of gendered feeding labor are performed in schools composed of students with different race, class, and age cohorts that emphasize displaying tough-love and efficiency while serving students food. Examining this form of labor allows us to see how social inequalities are maintained and sustained in the school cafeteria.