May 23, 2013 – ANSA Greetings & Well being
ROME – Avoid that approximately 40% of the food prepared for hospital patients and employees ends up in the dustbin, as happens today. By allocating meals to those who can no longer stand alone, such as the almost two million poor people assisted every day by the Food Bank with its 8,600 affiliated charitable structures. This is the project the Ministry of Health is working on, as announced by Minister Beatrice Lorenzin, welcomed by the hospitals which in many cases are already ready to join.
In a moment of increasingly dramatic economic crisis, an agreement between the Banco Alimentare del Piemonte and the Molinette hospital of the Città della Salute e della Scienza in Turin has been signed and has started in recent days. The Molinette hospital, led by the general manager Angelo Lino Del Favero, is one of the largest and most important in Italy and adheres to the Siticibo project, the Banco Alimentare program which allows for the recovery of meals not distributed in the collective and/or company canteens. Approximately 14,000 annual meals will be recovered (70-80 portions per day out of the 3,500 prepared daily in the hospital) from the canteen of the aforementioned hospital. This project is also realized thanks to the collaboration of the Euro Ristorazione catering company. Scrupulous procedures will ensure the correct treatment of recovered meals. In the cold chain, at the end of distribution, the food is brought to a low temperature, below 4 degrees, using special blast chillers and is kept in this way until it is reused. In the heat chain, the procedure requires that the temperature is always above 65 degrees. For this reason, at the end of distribution, the food is placed by the kitchen staff in active thermal containers and then collected by the Banco Alimentare del Piemonte, chaired by Roberto Cena. The recovered food is immediately delivered to the city canteens.
