Children are a vulnerable group in terms of obesity, nearly 20% of Hungarian kindergarten
and school-aged children are overweight or obese. School catering plays a decisive
role in shaping the nutritional behavior of children. To support the prevention of
obesity and to increase the quality of children’s diets, the provisions for school
catering were included in legislation in 2014. This work aims to provide a qualitative
content analysis of the round table discussion about the school catering system at
an interdisciplinary conference aiming at the identification of the most important
messages about school meals conveyed in the discussion. During the qualitative analysis
of the round table discussion, seven main categories emerged: factors supporting the
acceptance implementation of public catering, factors inhibiting the acceptance/implementation
of public catering, everyday problems in the implementation of public catering, the
task of caterers and public catering, the transformation of public catering, the cooperation
of parties interested in public catering, factors helping children to cooperate. The
co-occurrence network of subcategories and values breaks down into one large component
and several separate, small components. Thus, it can be concluded that the majority
of sub-themes and values are grouped into a coherent system. The results point to
the outstanding role of school catering in healthy nutrition and nutrition education
and the importance of close cooperation between parties interested in school catering
to promote the social acceptance of catering and the prevention of childhood obesity.
