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 children's nutritional behavior. To support the prevention of obesity
and to increase the quality of children's diets, legislation passed in 2014 included
provisions on school catering. This paper provides a qualitative content analysis
of a roundtable discussion on the school catering system that took place at an interdisciplinary
conference, with the aim of identifying the most important messages about school meals
conveyed by the discussion. During the qualitative analysis of the roundtable discussion,
seven main categories emerged: factors supporting the acceptance/implementation of
public catering; factors hindering 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; cooperation among parties
with an interest in public catering; and factors helping children to cooperate. The
co-occurrence network of subcategories and values can be broken down into one large
component and several separate, small components. Thus, it can be concluded that the
majority of subthemes and values are grouped into a coherent system. The results point
to the key role of school catering in healthy nutrition and nutrition education, and
the importance of close cooperation among parties with an interest in school catering
to promote the social acceptance of catering and the prevention of childhood obesity.
