PARIS — A few blocks away from the roaring La Concorde arena, where Olympic athletes skateboard, breakdance and play 3×3 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. An approach which, as it turns out, was not universally loved by athletes.
The Olympics is a geopolitical soft-power project as much as a sporting one, where the host country seeks to project its national image into the world. As such, Paris adopted a “food vision” for the Games, one that sought to combine France’s historical culinary excellence with the need for food sustainability to combat the climate crisis.
“Anyone coming to the Games in 2024 will be expecting to see incredible sporting performances, but as they will be in France, spectators will also be expecting good food,” Paris 2024 President Tony Estanguet said.
“Food is part of the French identity — an art de vivre that we are proud of and will strive to share during the Games,” he said, but added that “as the climate emergency looms greater than ever, it is also an enormous environmental and social challenge that we must rise to.”
A lot of that boiled down to: much less meat.
Eating animals is worse for the environment than plant-based options in every conceivable way. Farming livestock uses more land, water and energy than crops for humans. And each year the 1.5 billion cattle worldwide emit 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 all the dishes served to the general public have been meat-free, and 80% were sourced from local French produce. This is “the largest event catering operation in the world,” according to Paris 2024, which has delivered 13 million meals over the two-plus weeks to spectators, athletes, the media and other assorted guests.
While laudable, this effort has not been without some criticism from the athletes.
Several countries, most notably Great Britain, complained that there were not enough eggs and grilled meat being served in the Olympic village. Team GB went further, alleging that they were served raw meat, and British swimming star Adam Peaty reporting that his fish contained “worms.”
When NBC News asked for comment on these criticisms, Paris 2024 said in an emailed statement that its catering operations were “subject to regular inspections by the food safety authorities,” and it said that it had contracted a private inspection company to carry out additional checks in light of the complaints.
In the early days of the Games, the dining hall “experienced significant demand,” it said. “Certain foods, such as eggs and grilled meats, have been particularly sought after by athletes and their volume has therefore been increased.”
These changes “have significantly improved the quality of the service,” it said.
Paris’ food vision talked about “increasing and highlighting the vegetarian food available” to athletes. This was heavily criticized by Peaty, the Team GB swimmer. “The catering isn’t good enough for the level the athletes are expected to perform at,” he said in an interview with 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?”
On this, Paris 2024 said that while plant-based options were promoted in the Olympic Village, “there was never any question of placing the vegetarian objectives” above the athletes’ “nutritional needs and habits.”
Striving for a more plant-based diet clearly caused palpable tension with the carnivorous demands of some elite sportspeople. But 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 for the sandwich from the world-famous 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, just one of a host of Jewish, Arabic and North African offerings in these winding cobbled streets.
This is an aspect of France under considerable strain, as the political far-right makes electoral gains on a platform of staunch opposition to immigration.
Mazzia himself was born to French parents in the Republic of Congo. And the former basketball player is one of three superstar French chefs with their own offering at the athletes’ village. In a corner called “la Scène des Chefs,” he and fellow gastronomes Akrame Benallal and Amandine Chaignot have been serving up to 600 dishes per day to athletes on Sundays and Mondays.
So, after sampling the frogs’ legs and steak tartare at le Grand Colbert, and before waddling across town to cover some basketball, NBC News phoned Mazzia to ask about his philosophy.
“I think that this cuisine, frogs’ legs, steak tartare, are almost ancestral cuisines that no longer represent French gastronomy,” he said. “This is perhaps a cliché of French cuisine,” he added. “I didn’t think for a second about doing it; I didn’t even think of proposing this kind of dish” for his Olympic menu.
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, it’s changed, it’s in touch with its territory,” Mazzia said.
He and the other two chefs “wanted to represent modern France, the France of today, France in its time, not France in the previous time,” he added. It was important to show that French “cooking has evolved, it is lighter, it’s also more plant-based,” he said, but above all is “just exceptional and at the same time full of surprises.”
