The State Administration for Industry and Commerce and other departments recently announced that all food supplied to the Beijing Olympics must be uniformly affixed with electronic labels. By simply scanning the electronic label, all food products can be traced to their place of birth, production standards, output, batch size, etc., allowing continuous monitoring of Olympic food from source to table. It is the basic requirement of Beijing Olympic food to ensure that athletes participating in the 2008 Olympic Games can eat with confidence. However, what will be eaten in the restaurants of the Beijing Olympic Village by then? In addition to Olympic food safety, this is another food topic that everyone is most concerned about.

"Chinese and Western" recipe menu

Although the final number of dishes in the Olympic recipe is still uncertain, the principle is to keep it the same for seven days. Xiang Ping, deputy director of the Games Service Department of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee, said when visiting the official website of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee: Olympic recipes should not only meet the athletes' needs for calories and nutrition, but also conform to their religious habits and dietary tastes. It is predicted that the Beijing Olympic Games will have to meet the catering needs of 270,000 registered personnel from 202 countries and regions around the world. In addition, catering services will be provided for 7 million visitors. Although most of the athletes are from Europe and the United States, they also hope to reflect the food culture of the Chinese nation and allow them to enjoy Chinese food. Therefore, by then, the Beijing Olympic Village will adopt a food supply method with mainly Western food and supplemented by Chinese food.

At present, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee has identified a catering service supplier through bidding. This supplier has provided catering services for many Olympic Games, served more than 10 million people, and has a rich Olympic catering range. Service experience. The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee will draw lessons from previous Olympic Games and work with catering suppliers to formulate Olympic menus. After the menu is designed, a special expert group will be set up to review it and conduct meal tastings. The experts will analyze the composition of the menu and judge the color, flavor and taste. After various evaluations and checks, the menu will be submitted to the International Olympic Committee for approval. I believe that the menu produced after so many procedures will occupy an important page in the long history of Chinese food and be a milestone in the development of Chinese food.

The aroma of Chinese food in the Olympic “canteen”

Through the Olympic Games, Korean bibimbap and Japanese sushi have gone global. What about Chinese food? The Olympic recipes are currently being carefully considered. It is understood that 1,000 Chinese dishes have been recommended to the Olympic Organizing Committee.

Although Chinese food only accounts for 30% of the Olympic diet, experts pay no less attention to food safety than the 70% of Western food. Because Chinese food is too complex, with complex ingredients and a lot of supplements. The more materials you use, the more hidden insecurities there are and the greater the potential for things to go wrong. But complexity and sophistication are also the charm of Chinese food. While Chinese food faces huge challenges, it also encounters huge opportunities.

In addition, in order to make Chinese food quickly accepted and understood by athletes, coaches and officials around the world, experts have to do a lot of work other than food safety, such as translating dish names. The method of translating many dish names is to explain the cooking method. For example, the English literal translation of Sour Pork is "chicken with sweet and sour sauce", followed by the pinyin and pictures. “This is so that foreign friends can see it, eat it, and take it with them,” he said. Although we still don’t know which Chinese dishes can be included in the Olympic diet, they must be the ones that best reflect Chinese characteristics.