For three years now, John J. Scanlan has been planning how to throw breakfast, lunch and dinner for more than 4 million people from 170 countries. He`s come up with a menu with 700 items on it-mindful that Russians like borscht for breakfast, that Koreans like kim chi, that Eastern Europeans like dumplings, that Japanese like their rice cooked one way and Chinese like it cooked another.
Scanlan is vice president for special projects at Philadelphia-based ARA Services, which is the ”official food-server” for the 1992 Summer Olympics Friday through Aug. 9 in Barcelona.
That puts Scanlan in charge of some 400 eateries designed to serve 15,000 Olympic athletes and their coaches, 2,000 judges and other officials, 10,000 reporters, 35,000 volunteer workers and 25,000 security people plus 4 million tourists.
All these numbers don`t intimidate Scanlan. ”We serve 25,000 every day at the Pentagon, 100,000 every day at Boeing,” Scanlan points out.
But he concedes there are special challenges.
”Ninety percent of the food that will be served-anything with a shelf life-is already on hand before the athletes arrive to keep the number of delivery trucks to a minimum,” says Scanlan.
The job of official food server is to establish the specifications for value, quality and sanitation but not to do the actual cooking, serving or selling. Some 3,200 local people have been hired for that.
ARA calculates which supplies will be needed-500,000 pounds of meat and poultry, 50,000 gallons of milk, 700,000 pounds of fruit, 1 million tomatoes, and enough flour to bake 110,000 loaves of bread.
Scanlan, who started his career at ARA in 1962 as a college food service director, has been in on the planning of six Olympics since 1980.
In the three years that the Haddonfield, N.J., resident has been working with other Olympics planners, he has been out of the country about two weeks of every month. ”I do a bit of traveling,” Scanlan says wryly.
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The athletes are conscious of healthful foods-of getting sufficient carbohydrates and such-before they compete, he reports, but afterward they lean toward pizza or hamburger.
The most popular dish? Steak, no question, he says.