Public institutions purchasing from Sysco, US Foods and the like is akin to subsidies for the most industrially processed food producers.
Work with regional farmers either directly or through city markets to source real food and help galvanize small and medium scale producers of fresh food. The important question to ask, is which are the farmers who eat what they produce?
https://mesoproduce.com is a framework for just that
Honestly, I’m not sure how we could legally mandate that, given that these are private companies. However, we could encourage government institutions to prioritize purchasing locally and add local vendors to preferred vendor lists. This approach might incentivize companies like Sysco and US Foods to source from local vendors in order to remain on those preferred lists.
Thanks for your comment. What I meant was also what you indicated here:
we could encourage government institutions to prioritize purchasing locally and add local vendors to preferred vendor lists.
The public institutions can and should seek to source from regional vendors, as the larger conglomerate distributors tend to market the types of highly-processed and industrially produced ‘foods’ we should be curtailing.
Country of origin labels on all food products would tackle this issue.
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying.