For Eater, Jaya Saxena interviews Estelle Lamotte, Sodexo’s director of the Olympic Village, and senior executive chef Jeff Leidy to learn how they’ll meet individual food requirements for 15,000 athletes who must fuel medal-winning performances at the Paris olympics. Anyone have three million bananas to spare?
I’m curious how you went about sourcing the sheer quantity of ingredients that you have for the Olympics, while still ensuring that the quality is good enough, that this is sustainable, and that this is going to be flavorful, good food for everybody eating it.
EL: The meat will be 100 percent French, mostly vegetables from France, and the rest will be European. We are fortunate enough that we are physically able to get the resources from nearby. There are a couple of exceptions, but that’s because of the volume and the quantity and the range of products we have. And it’s great that the producers have played a part as well. Since last year, we could give them the information of what was needed to be planted and harvested according to our needs, and they’ve adapted. Eggs will be one of the massive products that will be consumed during the games. For the purchasing team, and procurement, it’s been a fantastic journey to really start from the beginning of the chain and work alongside producers.
There are a few products we need to source internationally: coffee, chocolate, bananas. Bananas are an athlete’s favorite thing. We anticipate getting two or three million bananas. At peak time there will be 15,000 people living in one place. So that means per day, at peak time, we’re going to go up to 40,000 meals. At the end of the entire journey, it’s over 1.2 million meals. I was working on quantifying the volume of coffee, how to produce it. And then someone said, “Can we get the coffee grinds back to us to use as a fertilizer?” So what’s the volume of grinds we’ll produce? I’’s 20 tons of coffee, so that means it’ll be 40 tons of coffee residue. But all of this is going to be used to grow mushrooms.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/nCJoyDb
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/b89jFfM
