PARIS — A few blocks from the La Concorde arena, where Olympic athletes have spent two weeks skateboarding, breakdancing and playing 3x3 basketball, there is a haven of quintessential Paris.
Le Grand Colbert is a traditional brasserie bedecked with white tablecloths, high, decorative ceilings and opulent chandeliers. But what makes it undeniably French is the food: frogs’ legs served with lashings of parsley and Provençal garlic butter; steak tartare (raw minced beef with a raw egg yolk); and escargots Burgundy-style, which is sea snails with, yes, more garlic and more butter.
But Paris 2024, now in its final days, has eschewed this gastronomic stereotype in favor of something altogether more modern. Though ostensibly about sport, the Olympics is also the largest catering operation in the world, serving some 13 million meals to athletes, spectators and officials.
It’s also a chance for countries to project their soft-power image onto the world.
Paris did this by creating a “food vision” manifesto, which sought to combine France’s historical culinary excellence with the need for food sustainability to combat the climate crisis.
It’s an approach which, as it turns out, was not universally loved by athletes. Some complained about the lack of protein in a menu that promoted plant-based alternatives; others alleged substandard quality, with isolated reports of food served raw or containing worms.
That has put a question mark over whether the Games has succeeded in its gastronomic ambitions.
“Every country sees this kind of event, whether it’s the Olympics or the soccer World Cup, as a tool for soft power,” said Loïc Bienassis, a food historian at the European Institute of Food History and Cultures, based at France’s University of Tours. “Maybe the obvious thing was to promote French cuisine, but they also wanted to show that in France we are also able to take into consideration the sustainble aspect.”
In this inherent push-and-pull between meat-loving French food and plant-based sustainability, Bienassis said Paris 2024 clearly favored the latter.
“The traditional aspects of French gastronomy, I don’t think that’s something which is really promoted during the Olympics,” he said. “In French cuisine, you have lots of meat, so there is a tension with the environmental aspect,” he added, and it was the environment that was “clearly much more important in their mind. And why not?”
Eating animals is far worse for the environment than plant-based alternatives, using more land, water and energy than crops farmed for humans. Each year, cattle alone fart into the atmosphere 231 billion pounds of methane, which has 27 times the global warming potential as carbon dioxide, according to the University of Oxford’s statistical publication Our World in Data.
And so at Paris 2024, 60% of dishes served to the public were meat-free, and 30% of athletes’ food. In the village, catering giant Sodexo Live! was contracted to produce 500 recipes along the themes of France, Asia, “Africa-Caribbean,” and “world cuisine.”
In hot-food buffets and salad bars, a central thread was “increasing and highlighting the vegetarian food available,” according to Paris’ food vision document.
This effort has not been without stinging criticism.
Several countries complained there were not enough eggs and grilled meat. Team Great Britain went further, its chief executive saying athletes were served raw meat. While British swimming star Adam Peaty reported that some of the fish contained “worms.”
“The catering isn’t good enough for the level the athletes are expected to perform at,” he said told Britain’s i newspaper. “The narrative of sustainability has just been pushed on the athletes,” he said. “I want meat, I need meat to perform and that’s what I eat at home, so why should I change?”
And Team USA gymnast Hezly Rivera gave her own thumbs-down review.
“I definitely think French food is good, but what we’re having in there, I don’t think it’s the best,” the 16-year-old said, albeit adding that “it gets the job done.”
On the allegations of raw food and worms, Paris 2024 said in a statement that it was “subject to regular inspections by the food safety authorities,” but had also contracted a private company to carry out additional checks in light of the complaints.
It put the protein shortages down to “significant demand” in the early days. “Certain foods, such as eggs and grilled meats, have been particularly sought after by athletes and their volume has therefore been increased.” Meanwhile, Sodexo Live! said that quantities of eggs and grilled meat were “immediately increased” following complaints of shortages, and for more than a week “these products have been sufficient to meet all needs.”
Paris 2024 added that “there was never any question of placing the vegetarian objectives” above the athletes’ “nutritional needs and habits.”
Team GB said it was not aware of any more instances of raw or worm-infested food, and referred NBC News to Paris 2024 for any further comment.
It’s not just environmental concerns that motivated this attempted culinary revolution.
French Michelin-starred chef Alexandre Mazzia says that the stereotype of French bistro cooking is outdated and unrepresentative of the multicultural, multifaceted food scene in the country.
Indeed, on a different afternoon this week, NBC News waited in line for 20 minutes just to get hold of a sandwich from the Europe-renowned L’As du Fallafel, in Le Marais, Paris’ historical Jewish quarter. The fully loaded pita did not disappoint, bursting with deep-fried chickpea fritters and oodles of hummus and pickled red cabbage.
This joint is just one of the Jewish, Arabic and North African offerings in these winding cobbled streets. It’s a facet of France under considerable strain, as the political far-right makes electoral gains on its platform of staunch opposition to immigration and multiculturalism.
Mazzia himself was born to French parents in the Republic of Congo. The former basketball player is one of three superstar chefs, alongside Akrame Benallal and Amandine Chaignot, who have their own “corner” in the Olympic Village, serving 600 dishes per day on Sundays and Mondays.
And so, after sampling the frogs’ legs and steak tartare at Le Grand Colbert, and before attempting to waddle across town to cover some basketball, NBC News interviewed Mazzia about his philosophy.
“I think that frogs’ legs and steak tartare are almost ancestral cuisines that no longer represent French gastronomy,” he said. “This is perhaps a cliché of French cuisine” and “I didn’t even think of proposing this kind of dish” for his menu, he said.
Instead he has been serving up exciting plates like hake with spices and tapioca, ground beef with licorice black rice, and risotto with green beans, blackberries and blackcurrants.
“French cuisine has evolved enormously,” said Mazzia, who “wanted to represent modern France, the France of today, not France in the previous time.”
French “cooking has evolved, it is lighter, it’s also more plant-based,” he added, but above all is “just exceptional and at the same time full of surprises.”
