If there’s an Olympic medal for translation, Norway’s team might want to do a little more practice.
When the chefs for Norway’s Olympic team wanted to order groceries for the country’s athletes at the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, the culinary experts ran their grocery list through Google Translate — and then sent the list that came out, now in Korean, to a nearby grocery store, NBC reports.
But the Norwegian chefs quickly realized there was a mistake in their translation: A truck stuffed with 15,000 eggs rolled up to their kitchens at the Pyeongchang Olympics, NBC reports. Broken down into 12-egg cartons, that’s a whopping 1,250 containers of eggs.
“There was literally no end to the delivery. Absolutely unbelievable,” chef Ståle Johansen told Aftenposten, a Norwegian publication.
Luckily, the Norwegians were able to return some 13,500 eggs — ending up with the 1,500 eggs the chefs had intended to order before the Google Translate snafu, Johansen told Aftenposten.
Those eggs will become everything from omelets and fried eggs to smoked salmon with scrambled eggs. Medal cookies might even be on the menu, the chefs said.
OL-leiren bestilte 1500 egg gjennom å oversette via Google Translate. Men det slo feil. 15.000 ble levert på døra. Vi ønsker lykke til og håper at de norske gullhåpene er glade – veldig glade – i egg: pic.twitter.com/qaWVpq1Xgy
— Trønder-Avisa (@tronderavisa) February 3, 2018
But sending back thousands of eggs might not even be the most daunting task these chefs take on, considering the Olympic-sized appetites and odd schedules of the hungry athletes they’re charged with feeding.
“The biggest challenge is that we will serve food almost 24 hours a day,” Johansen told Aftenposten.
Feeding athletes well is a key part of each team’s success — and food needs can differ greatly from athlete to athlete, Megan Chacosky, a dietitian and chef for the U.S. ski and snowboard team, told Mic. Some athletes need more calories or protein to gain weight and muscle after surgery, for example — while others need to be tricked into eating their vegetables, she said.
“I often joke that it’s like making Thanksgiving dinner twice a day,” Chacosky told Mic.
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