Friday lunch offered thanks to public procurement
Torino is one of the few Italian cities that, when there is to host an international cooperation conference, entrusts catering to a social cooperative.
The festival thus hosts an important "thematic lunch", on Friday 26, at Torino Incontra, in the year of the European project Food smart cities for development of which the City of Turin is a partner.
It is offered by the Municipality of Turin through the International Cooperation and Peace Unit of the International Relations Service for European Projects Cooperation and Peace. It is a real smart food event for festival participants; a light lunch with particular characteristics, provided by Meeting Servicewww.meeting-service.it.
The history of the Meeting Service it's particular. It is not a simple catering company but a reality that has behind it a social project of training and introduction to the world of work for particularly disadvantaged people who, thanks to food, manage to achieve paths of emancipation and autonomy.
Even in this, Turin is a school.
The Municipality has, in fact, decided to favor the participation of this type of companies in tenders for the supply of catering services in the context of cooperation projects. On the one hand, we guarantee the events that have to do with the themes of peace and international solidarity, services suitable for the "theme". On the other, in such a way that, concretely, the money allocated for solidarity, even indirectly, is spent in solidarity.
Furthermore, the City of Turin has chosen to use, even for this kind of services, the clause contained in the legislation for purchases by the public administration which provides for favor green purchases. For a catering service this takes the form of an obligation for the supplier to supply organic food, for which the same amount of pesticides used by conventional agriculture is not used, or at zero km (whose contribution to the environment is given by the reduction of emissions resulting from the reduction in transport). Or the supply of foodstuffs that come from fair trade, or those that do not include the consumption of meat prohibited by religious rules.
"The tender called for by the Food Journalism Festival - spiga Maria Bottiglieri, head of the service of the Municipality of Turin - has an economic value of a few thousand euros, so it is really marginal compared to the tenders aimed at purchasing collective catering services such as for example, school catering, in which social clauses and green clauses have been present for some time. However, what needs to be highlighted is that it does not detect the quantity or amount put to tender but the approach that a public body decides to have with respect to solidarity food purchases, because it is this approach that somehow allows us to acquire “lifestyles institutional "sustainable from every point of view (social, environmental and economic). The potential of "public procurement" in orienting the food market is indeed very high and can therefore be a determining factor in promoting the implementation of the right to adequate food for all citizens ".
