Olympic Games Paris 2024: Olympic Village food, supplying French cuisine.

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. In an effort to lower the Games’ carbon footprint, Olympic chefs have tried to embrace plant-based dishes, both in the athletes’ cafeteria and at the venues, where Phryge tells fans, “Veni, Vidi, Veggie!” But the merchants at Rungis, the gargantuan wholesale market that provides much of the capital’s food, have their own ideas about Olympic performance. “It’s really the perfect food supply for a marathon,” observed Véronique Gillardeau, shucking her namesake oysters at 4 a.m. one day last week as the last buyers packed up their trucks. “It’s the Uberization of society.” Rungis was established out here in 1969, at the confluence of highways, railroads, and an airport, moving from a congested central Paris location called Les Halles. Émile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris evokes this lost world in poetic detail: “The warm afternoon sun had softened the cheeses; the mold on the rinds was melting and glazing over with the rich colors of red copper verdigris, like wounds that have badly healed; under the oak leaves, a breeze lifted the skins of the olivets, which seemed to move up and down with the slow deep breathing of a man asleep.” A diorama of the grocers in a chapel of the adjacent Saint-Eustache church portrays them as exiles, but instead of their belongings on their carts, they have cabbages.