When we think about the Olympics, we think of the events, the ceremonies and the athletes, but have you ever considered what it takes to feed all the people involved? Preparing food for the 15-thousand athletes and support staff’s 40-thousand meals a day at the Paris 2024 Olympic Village is basically the biggest catering job ever.
Sodexo Live!, the food provider for the Olympics, has been buying up entire fields of produce, eggs and chickens from farms across France ahead of the 24/7 dining operation. At the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics:
- The catering team will be making 2-million meals for athletes from 206 countries.
- A third of the food will be plant-based and 30% will be organic, with 80% of all food sourced from France.
- Only three items will be coming from other countries: bananas, coffee and chocolate. And we’re talking a lot of bananas - 3-million - as well as 27-tons of coffee in Olympic Village.
- They’re focusing on four different culinary themes - French, Asian, World and African-Caribbean.
- Key recipes for each of those types of cuisine include veggie bourguignon for the French theme, minced pork with Thai basil and basmati rice for the Asian cuisine, fried shrimp with chermoula sauce for African-Caribbean and a veggie moussaka for the world cuisine.
- In the Olympic Village there will be a salad bar, grill, cheese station, bakery, hot food buffet, fruit bar and dessert bar, as well as a condiment bar with 85 options.
- Two foods you won’t find there? French fries, because of the risk of fire from using deep fryers in a space with so many people, and Avocados, because they’d have to be imported from so far away and require so much water to grow.
- The 52-acre Village has 15 different dining spaces, including a main dining hall with 35-hundred seats that will be open 24 hours a day.
- There will be more than 20 senior chefs from around the world who speak a range of languages there to answer athletes’ questions about food options.
- The Athletes’ Village will be open for two months total, from when athletes start arriving on July 12th before the Olympics begins to September 11th at the close of the Paralympics, with just a three day break between the two events.
Source: Delish
Scott's Thoughts:
- Now I want to go to the Olympics just to eat all that food!
- I was today years old when I learned that Olympic teams don’t provide the food for their athletes.
- The Radio Stations of iHeartRadio are the exclusive audio partner with NBC for Olympic Coverage!