Olympic team's chef uses Google translate to place order, accidentally gets 13,500 extra eggs

A total of 35 people contracted salmonella linked to the massive egg recall that was announced in mid-April. (iStock)

Which came first, the typo or the eggs?

The chef for Norway’s Olympics team accidentally ordered an extra 13,500 eggs because of an error in Google Translate.

Norwegian chef Stale Johansen meant to place an order for 1,500 eggs to feed his country’s Olympians at the Pyeongchang Games. But last week, he was shocked when 15,000 eggs showed up in his kitchen.

“The eggs was more like a misunderstanding than something that we needed, so it was an extra zero on the order, so 1,500 to 15,000,” Norwegian chef de mission Tore Ovrebo told Reuters.

South Korea has a notoriously complex numerical system, with different systems of counting for different purposes. One simple syllable change could easily cause the mix-up. The chefs were able to return the extra 13,500 eggs, so that the Olympic athletes can have more than omelettes, egg salad, hard-boiled and deviled eggs while at the games.

Despite the scrambled order, the toughest part of cooking for Olympians is scheduling.

“The biggest challenge is that we will serve food almost 24 hours a day,” chef Johansen told Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. “We have cross-country skiing and ice skating here, and there is food from half past eight in the morning for almost two nights.”