Photo: Ibex73 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, cropped.
Sixty percent of the food on offer to spectators at the Paris 2024 Olympic venues is plant-based, a huge shift for the world's biggest sporting event.
That's the figure reported by PCMA's Convene magazine, and it matches what the organizers promised back in April, when Euronews reported that 60% of the food served to the general public would be meat-free and 80% of it sourced in France. That's a whole lot of plates.
It's part of Paris 2024's goal of halving its carbon footprint compared with previous Games. Caterer Sodexo Live! is running the Athletes' Village restaurant, which serves 40,000 meals a day around the clock to 3,500 diners at a time, making it the largest restaurant on earth, and around a third of its menu is plant-based. Fortune reports that 30% of the village meals are plant-based, while Convene puts plant-based options at 33% of the menu.
Sodexo Live! chef Jeff Leidy, one of 25 head chefs working on the Games, told Fortune:
Plant-based food is not only great tasting and flavorful, it's also great for the environment and we are helping to reduce the carbon footprint by twofold.
Among his dishes is a cauliflower Alfredo (the "caulifredo"), which is 100% plant-based, made with cashew cream and vegan Parmesan. Village executive chef Charles Guilloy has a dahl made with green lentils grown around Paris. And the menus weren't thrown together. Estelle Lamotte, Sodexo Live!'s director of the Olympic village, told Convene the chefs and nutritionists worked with France's National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance (INSEP) on every dish:
Each menu went through about seven or eight iterations before being finalized.
So the plants are on the menu with sports scientists' blessing, and the science is firmly on the side of the chefs. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found plant protein builds muscle just as well as animal protein, and plenty of Olympians already train on plants.
We've been covering vegan Olympians for years, from the only male US weightlifter at Rio 2016 to the vegan Olympian who won gold and rescued a dog and the athletes who promoted ditching cow's milk at the closing ceremony. Big events are catching on, with the Golden Globes going 100% plant-based and COP28 serving world leaders a two-thirds plant-based menu.
Faster, higher, stronger, and now greener. Allez!