Alimentação escolar

Abstract

The Brazilian School Meal Programme (PNAE) has faced significant changes since its creation. Besides providing food to students during the school day, it aims to improve learning and encourage healthier eating habits. Despite the recent managerial efforts, PNAE still faces challenges such as the improvement of the quality of school meals. On the other hand, new technologies have been developed and applied to food services, for example, the cook-chill system and minimally processed vegetables (MPV), which are especially suitable for centralized meals production. However, seldom are the Brazilian countiesresponsible for the PNAE local administrationthat invest in these nonconventional food processing technologies. The objective of this study was to assess the PNAE management in counties located at the state of São Paulo, Brazil, attempting to identify factors of success or failure with respect to meals production systems -centralized (CS) or decentralized (DS). Initially, a sample of 54 counties was determined and from them a sub-sample (N=12) was systematically drawn, being six CS-cities and six DS-cities. Technical visits in the sampled cities were made and a quali-quantitative methodological approach was used to collect data, which were further submitted to descriptive statistically analyses summarized to be analyzed and interpreted. Food supply could be considered adequate in only four of the six cities with DS. About 79% of the students in the cities of DS make their meals in the schools' restaurants, versus 62% in cities with CS and this fact may be due to attractiveness and the temperature of the meals: in three of CS-cities, the meals were served at temperatures lower than 60°C, which diminishes sensory acceptability. Considered a success factor in DS, attractiveness reached the highest rate (ten points) in three cities, while in cities with CS, the highest score was only seven. In four out of ten schools in the cities with DS the percentage of surplus was lower than 7%.Conversely, in cities with CS six out of ten schools presented surplus lower than 7%. With respect to plate waste CS schools showed an average rate of 16% viii compared to only 11% in DS schools. In conclusion, results showed that there is a need to consider new alternatives to ensure meals production efficiency aiming at safety and attractiveness. Moreover, the centralized production associated with the new cooking technologies, can be effective as long as they can be adapted to the peculiarities of each city.