“There is a territorial inequality of citizens and canteens vis-à-vis organic”

In the kitchens of the Nancy University Hospital, Tuesday March 15, a good smell of cream escapes. Julien Fabbro, catering manager, guides us from one pot to another: “We are in the production sector which is capable of producing more than 2,000 rations for the same dish”. Nearly 6,000 meal trays are prepared every day for patients and hospital employees. “French spinach, eggs produced in France, French milk béchamel…”, he says proudly. But in the recipe for these Benedict eggs, no organic product.

“For the year 2021, we are on a volume of quality products of around 15%, including 3.5% organic. We are clearly not in the target today”, regrets Julien Fabbro. The target is the objectives of the Egalim law: 50% sustainable and quality products in collective catering, including 20% ​​organic products by 2022. But this ambition, formulated in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron, is far from be reached.

“What we know with a fairly good degree of certainty is that currently, we are at almost 6% in canteens”, explains Laure Verdeau, Director of the Organic Agency. A figure that includes the school, medical, business and prison sectors. For its part, the Ministry of Agriculture, estimates that the share of sustainable products (including organic) “varies between 10 and 15% depending on the catering segment”.

First obstacle put forward by collective restaurants: the price of organic certified raw materials. Julien Fabbro gives the example of organic yogurt from Lorraine, “2.5 times more expensive than a conventional yoghurt, it is an additional cost which remains substantial”. The kitchen manager also believes that the local organic sector is not “structured” enough to meet the constraints of a hospital: “A meal corresponds to 45 variations of different menus. The raw materials are characterized in terms of nutritional intake. Today, we cannot replace a green bean with a turnip because the supplier did not have the conditions to deliver “.

For Julien Fabbro, organic only has ecological virtues if it is local. An argument put forward by many managers of collective restaurants, notes Agence Bio. But the reasoning does not hold, according to its president Laure Verdeau, Ademe study in support.

“Insofar as the transport of a food only represents a third of its environmental footprint against two thirds for its mode of production, it is better to have organic, even if this food comes from a little further”.

Laure Verdeau, director of the Organic Agency

at franceinfo

She acknowledges, however,a territorial inequality of citizens and canteens vis-à-vis organic”. With regions “where there are many more settlements, for example Occitanie, Nouvelle-Aquitaine” andt others like the Grand-Est region “in the process of catching up”.

At Agria, a company restaurant on the left bank of Rouen (Seine-Maritime) and its 900 daily covers, the offer of sustainable and quality products “is around 5%, including 3% organic”, explains Céline Gadon, manager. She also raises the question of prices and insists on the concern for local preference. But opening the door of the cold room, Robert Thierry, second in the kitchen, shows us aubergines and tomatoes from Morocco.“We have two vegetable dishes to present every day, I’m not going to serve pumpkin puree every day. It’s a restaurant”, he justifies.

So how do good students do it? How to reach 20% organic products while meeting the constraints of collective catering? “By meeting the suppliers, by exchanging a lot with them”, answers Dominique Maupin, director of the central kitchen of the schools of Rouen and Bois-Guillaume (7,500 daily meals) which displays 43% organic food. “As they went along, they made improvements in the way of delivering the products and for the calibers that we wanted”.

The majority of these suppliers are located within a radius of 50 kilometers around Rouen. “Our priority is local organic, then national organic and then products with high environmental value, farms, labeled”, Dominique Maupin list. “It’s somewhere a philosophy, to feed the planet well, to feed people and children well, he adds. We can have local reasoned 25 km away, but which can be stuffed with pesticides, for example, or fertilizers.

This conversion to organic was done gradually: from 7% in 2011 to over 40% ten years later. Sirest, the inter-municipal school catering union of Rouen-Bois-Guillaume, has set itself the objective of reaching 50% organic products by 2023. For the moment, the price of meals has not increased, thanks to a plan to combat waste. But Dominique Maupin thinks that sooner or later it will be necessary to ask municipal elected officials for an additional financial effort.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the share of organic in school canteens has increased from 3.4% in 2017 to 10% in 2021. According to the Organic Agency, this is the sector for which the transition is progressing the fastest. .