When it comes to feeding the world's top athletes at the Summer Olympics in Athens, almost everything comes supersized.
There's a 3,900m2 kitchen, hundreds of tons of meat and produce, millions of litres of bottled water and thousands of voracious swimmers, runners, weightlifters and others who want tasty cuisine -- and lots of it -- all the time.
"They'll normally double up and triple up their portions, so we're talking about two or three pounds of food per meal, and three or four meals per day, for each athlete," Michael R. Crane, senior executive chef of Aramark, said in a telephone interview from Athens.
The Philadelphia-based food service company estimates it will serve more than 2 million meals to athletes, coaches and officials in Athens for two months, including the 17 days of competition.
The company has had to contend with construction delays, concerns over security arrangements to stop terrorists and a blackout that hit Athens on July 12, but Aramark officials said things will be running smoothly by the time the games open Aug. 13.
"There are some things that are a little time-sensitive, roads are congested, you've got construction and a lot of things happening everywhere," Marc Bruno, a vice president for Aramark's International Group, said from Athens. "It's all going to come together."
Aramark, which has run food services at 12 previous Olympics, is partnering with Greek hospitality company Daskalantonakis Group to feed some 10,500 athletes from a record 201 countries, along with coaches and Olympic officials.
In all, 85 Aramark executives and chefs are managing and staffing the kitchens in Athens, along with well over 1,000 students from US and Greek culinary schools and colleges providing assistance.
Aramark expects to serve 24,000 meals a day -- and 55,000 a day during peak times such as opening and closing ceremonies.
Chefs in Philadelphia conducted six months of taste testings for the hundreds of international meals, among them vegetables with peanut sauce, Brazilian fish stew and Moroccan lemon chicken with olives. Then they had to come up with precise ingredient measurements.
"If you're off by a little salt, a little anything, and you blow up the recipe to 8,000 portions, you end up being off by a huge amount" that throws off the taste and the nutritional values, Crane said.
There will be about 15 entrees available on each menu, created by hundreds of chefs from Japan, Korea, Chile, Germany, Canada, the UK and elsewhere.
The menus were planned with vegetarian, vegan, kosher and halal diets in mind and feature tastes from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas as well as Greece.
Hits and misses on the menu become clear right away when you're feeding thousands.
"As you get into large-volume production, you quickly come to understand what's popular and what's not," Crane said. "There's a little bit of a learning curve for the first week, then we make adjustments and modifications as we go."
This year, they're waiting to see if the low-carbohydrate trend will turn up in the Olympic Village. That probably won't be the case, at least among the athletes, said Stanley Segall, a professor of nutrition and food science at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
"My suspicion is that athletes who want to maximize their performance are not going to go on a low-carb regimen," he said. Coaches and officials, however, "may try as much to follow the regimen they have at home, so you may see it more among the other groups."
Athens' cuisine will reflect lessons Aramark learned from past Summer Olympic forays in Atlanta and Sydney. Among them: Spicy is good.
"We thought that we should modify the flavorings and tone down the traditionally spicy dishes, but the athletes told us loud and clear: `We want the heat, we want the real thing,'" Crane said. "They want foods with the flavorings they're used to -- curry pastes, fish sauces, different kinds of miso."
"If you think that athletes don't eat a lot sweets, I'm here to tell you that they do," Crane said.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later
RSS