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UD students to help feed Olympic athletes

3:55 p.m., Dec. 9, 2003--During the 2004 summer Olympic games in Athens, 60 to 100 students from UD’s Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management (HRIM) program will work with Aramark to feed more than 15,000 athletes, coaches, staff and officials living in the Olympic Village.

“Aramark chefs and nutritionists develop a ‘World Menu’ with over 550 recipes designed to meet the needs of athletes from 200 different countries, different ethnic and religious backgrounds and varying nutritional needs to help them achieve their best during their Olympic performances,” Fred DeMicco, Aramark Chair in Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management at UD, said.

With 1,500 different menu items available, 24 hours a day, the students will have their work cut out for them. Some of the stranger dishes that appeared on athletes’ plates during the 2000 Sydney Olympics included: kangaroo prosciutto, smoked emu, grilled mako shark and goat vindaloo.

This will be DeMicco’s third time taking students to the Olympic Village to work for Aramark. In 1996, his students worked the summer games in Atlanta, and they traveled to Sydney to work in the 2000 summer games. The previous trips were with students from Penn State, where DeMicco taught before coming to UD.

Athens ‘04 is the first opportunity for UD’s HRIM students to work in the Olympic village. They will travel to Athens sometime in late July and will undergo an intense training period before the Olympics begin Aug. 13.

“The exposure to this type of event provides more learning than any other food service venture,” Jerome Bill, of Aramark, said. “Usually a small city is built, operated for approximately 33 days and then is taken down just as fast. The logistics are tremendous.”

Aramark recruits and trains more than 6,500 persons to prepare and serve more than 5 million meals during the 33 days the Olympics and Para-Olympics take place. The grocery list for such an event is enormous. In Atlanta in 1996, some of the major ingredients that Aramark used included 576,000 eggs, 34,000 pounds of rice, 32,800 pounds of margarine and 9,057 pounds of shredded cheddar cheese, according to DeMicco.

The students will be paid $15 an hour, and Aramark also will pay for their hotel rooms in Athens. Students are responsible for their own airfare. Once they arrive, the students will be outfitted with special uniforms and clearance passes to get them into the tightly secured Olympic Village. When they are not working, they will have the opportunity to go to whatever events they choose and to meet athletes who have finished competing.

Article by Dean Geddes, AS ’05

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