A Case Study on Leftover Lunch Service – Summary of the article

My article on leftover lunch service has now been published online in the journal Food, Culture & Society. Here’s a brief summary of the article. Olen kirjoittanut hävikkilounaasta aiemmin myös suomeksi.

Food is one of the most critical consumption domains from the standpoint of sustainability (Davies et al. 2014; Tukker et al. 2010). Of all edible food produced globally, one third is wasted every year, adding more than three billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (Gustavsson et al. 2011; Porpino et al. 2015). At the same time, even in a wealthy Nordic country like Finland, a growing number of people are in need of food (Hanssen et al. 2014).

The city of Jyväskylä in Finland has acted as an arena of a variety of experiments: in 2013–2015 the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra and the City of Jyväskylä conducted a joint project that promoted “wise use of natural resources and creating the preconditions for sustainable well-being”. As part of the project, experiments varying from encouraging behavioral change to changing ways of organizing municipal services, were implemented (see Berg et al. 2014; Laakso and Lettenmeier 2016).

The leftover lunch service was one of these experiments, and it was conducted on the basis of an idea of a school canteen worker. The service aimed at minimizing serving losses (i.e. food left in serving dishes after the children’s lunch) in schools and thus reducing the environmental impacts of food waste. Every day, after the students’ lunch hour, canteen workers hang either a red note, stating that there is no food left, or a green note, welcoming people inside for a lunch, to the canteen door. If there is food left in serving dishes, people can come for a lunch in the canteen. Canteen workers themselves are responsible for organizing the service.

The service was first experimented for two weeks at one service center for elderly people and one school. After the two-week experiment, canteen workers at the service center concluded that as the lunch that they normally provided was not free for the customers, the leftover lunch opportunity just made the customers shift their lunch hour later, so that they could pay less for the meal as it had become a “leftover lunch” (Mattinen et al. 2014). As there were no similar problems at the school, the leftover lunch continued and soon spread to two other schools.

Since the beginning of the experiment in 2013, the service has gained a lot of media attention, which has accelerated the spread of the new practice to schools in other municipalities. In 2013, members of the Parliament presented a written question to the Government about the promotion of the leftover lunch service in Finland. In 2014, Sitra published guidelines for organizing the service for municipal workers, to facilitate further broadening of the practice. Despite some differences between municipalities, the main principles of the service remain the same. The public service providers cannot profit from the service. In Jyväskylä, the leftover lunch costs 1.50 euros, which covers the cost of bread, spread, and a drink – the meal itself is free. The service is targeted for elderly, unemployed, and other non-working people, although the income of diners is not controlled and thus everyone can come for a lunch. The main aim is still to minimize food surplus in the first place, so there is not always leftover food left.

More than thirty municipalities around Finland now service leftover lunch daily. The service has also been made permanent in the three schools in Jyväskylä, and it will be implemented in rest of the schools in 2016. More than 7,000 meals, 6–30 daily, were served in 2014 in these three schools, mostly to elderly people. It can thus be said that the practice of serving leftover lunch has become an entity, constituting of common understandings, rules, infrastructures, and recognizable sequences of actions, and being guided by standards for successfully organizing the service.

In November 2015, two years after the start of the experiments, I visited in three schools in Jyväskylä serving leftover lunch, had lunch with the diners and later interviewed them about their experiences on the service.

The findings of the study show that participating in the leftover lunch had become a routine for many diners – it provided a daily reason for leaving home and having some exercise, and a wholesome hot meal with other people. It was both a personal and a collective practice, shaped by norms and rules of performing the practice, meanings of proper, commensal eating, and competences of organizing everyday living on the prerequisite of being at a certain place at a certain time (Devaney and Davies 2016; Delormier et al. 2009; Paddock 2017; Warde 2016). After the retirement or unemployment, a person easily drops out of the familiar rhythms (Jonsson et al. 2000), and provision of a regular lunch enables these people to maintain a structure in their everyday living. In addition, regular and commensal eating practices are perceived to enhance the quality of life and health of individuals by providing predictability and stability (Holm et al. 2015; Jastran et al. 2009). Gathering for a lunch at the school and establishing “commensal relationships (Sobal and Nelson 2003) could be compared to eating a family dinner at home that is still an important everyday ritual in most people’s lives (Bugge and Almås 2006; Fiese et al. 2006) but not an option for many elderly or lonely people.

The school as a space for having lunch had many advantages: first, instead of just selling food to go, it provided a space for eating together – although not everyone considered the social aspect important, the lunch was still an opportunity to avoid eating alone (Lee 2015). Second, as the diners mostly came from within one-kilometer radius from the school, it was easier to distribute the information about the service by “the word on the street” in the neighborhood. Participating neighbors acted as peers validating the service, as they provided references and hence lowered the threshold of participating in the lunch (Dubuisson-Quellier and Gojard 2016). Third, schools are institutes providing the infrastructure, facilities, and canteen workers’ professionalism for food provision. Dense school network enables also elderly diners with reduced mobility to participate in the lunch, increasing their independence. Fourth, the different diner groups (such as school children and elderly or unemployed people) made organizing leftover lunch possible, as there was no risk of the paying customers to switch to leftover lunches for canteens or risk of facing the judgment of other adults for the diners.

The leftover lunch service was originally experimented as a way to reduce food waste, and hence cut down the carbon emissions at the local level. This framing of the service as an environmental act, rather than food aid for low-income people (although they were the target groups) was important – even if most diners did not even see the service as a matter of environmental sustainability. This was due to the social acceptability of participating in the lunch. Food waste prevention agenda attracted also some higher-income diners for lunch. If the service were framed as food aid, the threshold of participating might have been higher (Hanssen et al. 2016). The framing also made the role of canteen workers easier, as they did not have to act as gatekeepers, estimating who needed the service most, but their main task was to minimize the amount of food waste.

To conclude, the leftover lunch has become a nationally recognized way of reducing edible food waste in schools. This is due to the positive media attention, institutions providing the facilities, and active municipal workers making the initiatives for organizing the service at the local level. The ways the leftover lunch service was organized – how the meal was prepared, where it was served and how the service was framed – scripted the ways in which diners participated in the lunch and talked about it. However, the people participating in the lunch, or carrying the practice, were also important in reproducing the practice and recruiting new practitioners. Maintaining the practice happens in a constant dynamics between all these elements.

 

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