Almost one in ten households in Italy is experiencing food poverty, and the problem has an impact on children's healthy development: how much do school canteens matter.
Even today, well into the twenty-first century, food poverty remains a very real and widespread problem. And not only in the less developed parts of the world, but right here, in Europe. In Italy, and especially in some regions of the south. In general, 8.4 per cent of Italian households cannot afford a protein-based meal every two days, as nutritionists recommend.
According to the report by the Osservatorio Con i bambini, produced by Con i Bambini and Openpolis, food poverty particularly affects children and young people going through their developmental years: in Italy, on average, 2.8 per cent of minors do not eat a protein-based meal every day, a sign of possible food poverty. This is a figure that should not be overlooked, especially in certain parts of the country. Territorial disparities are very wide. In Sicily, the share of children and young people who do not consume at least one protein-based meal a day exceeds 8 per cent: eight children in every hundred are not eating enough. This is followed by Campania (5.4 per cent), Basilicata (4.9 per cent) and Lazio (4.5 per cent). Meanwhile, the percentage falls below 1 per cent in Marche, Abruzzo, Puglia and Piedmont.
This is a phenomenon that is underestimated in Italy and which, according to the Osservatorio Con i bambini, has multiple facets "ranging from financial means to nutritional education, through to access to services." Within this picture, "the contribution of school canteens is paradigmatic."
In recent years, reports from the Italian parliamentary ombudsman for childhood have frequently underlined the role of expanding canteen provision in tackling food poverty. In the most recent report, presented in June 2022, it was noted that "school canteens, for some children, represent the most complete and nutritious meal of the day": an observation that is far from incidental, and one that is borne out by the available data. The regions with the highest risk of food poverty among minors do, in many cases, coincide with those that have the fewest school canteens. The six regions in which fewer than one in four state schools has a canteen are precisely Sicily and Campania (where only one school in ten has a canteen), followed by Calabria, Basilicata, Lazio and Molise, all of which fall between 18 and 21 per cent, no more.
These are also the regions that, in virtually the same order, rank highest in terms of the share of minors who do not eat a protein-based meal every day. With the exception of Calabria and Molise (whose data were not released due to the small size of the sample used for the survey), the others follow the same order. Sicily, which tops the ranking for the share of minors who do not consume protein-based meals daily (8.4 per cent of the total in 2019), is followed by Campania in the unenviable table of food deprivation (5.4 per cent).
By contrast, in Tuscany and Piedmont — the only two regions, besides Valle d'Aosta, where the share of school buildings equipped with a canteen exceeds 60 per cent — the percentage of children and young people who do not eat protein-based meals every day stands below 2 per cent: another figure that in some way confirms the inverse correlation between food poverty and the availability of school canteens. Piedmont in particular is the region with the best food deprivation indicator (0.2 per cent) and the second highest canteen provision, just behind Valle d'Aosta, for which data on minors at risk of educational poverty is not available.
Looking more closely at the data municipality by municipality, among the most populous cities those that stand out for the presence of school canteens are Turin (64.1 per cent), Florence (53.7 per cent) and Bologna (45.9 per cent). It is worth noting, however, that a number of larger municipalities, including some of considerable size (such as Milan, Catania, Palermo and Naples), report anomalous figures of below 10 per cent of the total.
These figures should be treated with caution, as the Osservatorio Con i Bambini itself emphasises: the presence of school canteens is certainly not the only factor affecting food deprivation, and is itself a consequence of the socio-economic conditions of individual regions, as well as the level of nutritional awareness and the financial means of individual families. Nevertheless, the Observatory explains, "the role of canteens in providing all children with one healthy and balanced meal a day should not be overlooked — an aspect highlighted for good reason in the ombudsman's report." It is equally unsurprising that the investments of the Piano nazionale di ripresa e resilienza are moving in this direction: the plan contains numerous measures concerning school buildings, among them the programme to extend full-time schooling (960 million in investment), which will also be based on the creation or renovation of canteen spaces in at least one thousand buildings.
