The host country of the Olympic Games has a lot of chores and responsibilities. Build new or modernize existing sports facilities, place participants in the Olympic Village, provide them with everything they need, including food. And this is a very difficult task!
There are a lot of athletes participating in the Olympics, and each of them has their own diet, their own culinary preferences, due, among other things, to national, religious characteristics, as well as the individual reaction of the body.
In any Olympic village (and at the current Olympic Games in London, of course, too) there are several restaurants working on the principle of a buffet, when each visitor independently takes the dishes that he wants to eat. Moreover, no one limits him either in the choice of food or in the size of the portions. The only criterion is the athlete's health and appetite. The assortment of the offered menu is very wide, it includes dishes from different types of meat, fish and poultry, a variety of vegetarian dishes, all kinds of cold and hot snacks, side dishes, desserts, sweets, and can satisfy the most demanding taste.
The menu offered to Olympic athletes also includes dishes prepared in a special way for people who strictly observe religious canons, for example, kosher food for adherents of Judaism, halal food for Orthodox Muslims, etc.
Most of the delegations also include chefs who prepare national dishes for their athletes. For example, for the Ukrainian national team, chefs traditionally cook borscht and dumplings, for the Kazakh team - manti and horse meat dishes, for athletes from Uzbekistan - the famous pilaf.
Each athlete, if desired, can eat outside the Olympic Village. But this does not happen often due to the hectic training and competition schedule.
The amount of food consumed depends not only on the individual characteristics of the body of the Olympic athlete, but also on the kind of sport he is engaged in and the loads transferred. It is clear, for example, that a weightlifter and an air rifle shooter consume different amounts of energy and need, respectively, a different calorie and composition of food.
