Thursday 8th of May I went to a party, where over 2 thousand people were invited, 538 people RSVP’d yes, and everyone was asked to bring a knife…

…and a cutting board.

Düsseldorf’s first ‘Schnippeldisko – Krumme Möhren und schräg beats’ (English ‘Dicing Disco – bent carrots and crooked beats’).

Düsseldorfs Slow Food Youth Group teamed up with Feeding the 5k to put on this fabulous event where supermarket rejects, heart shaped potatoe’s, carrots with legs, were rescued and made into food for the masses, by the masses.

Picture an old warehouse hall, set up with rows of German Beer banks all full of people peeling and chopping. There’s no more room so people are standing in groups and peeling and sitting on the stage, sofa’s and the floor to chop and peel. A DJ at the front of the room is spinning old school tunes on proper records. People are moving back and forth through the crowd, sometimes in pairs carrying crates of ‘geschnippelte’ fruit and veg, or fruit and veg going to be schnippelt above their heads. At some stage the first course is announced from the DJ pulpit and the schnippelling is over, let the eating and dancing begin!

The volunteers, organisers and masses produced a (surprisingly for the size) yummy vegetable soup with fresh croutons and all! Next course was fruit salad, followed by green salad. The green salad went missing for a while, one of our group who went of to get some when they announced the salad asked one of the organisers where to find it and received an answer along the lines of ‘That’s your job! Find the salad! And when you’ve found the salad, serve the salad!’ His continued efforts to find dout from the person where he might look for the salad only resulted in more jobs… ‘and then you’ve got to find someone else to serve the salad!’ So that didn’t really get us anywhere, anyway – someone eventually found and served the salad and we were all happy.

All courses were even served on proper china plates with proper spoons! Yay! Food was great, people were wonderful, organisers & volunteers did an amazing job, it was like a massive street party.

So there you go, there were more than 300 people in a room together, all with knives, alchohol was being served… and nobody got stabbed! It is possible!

The worst party poopers were a group of about 4 blokes who smoked on the dance floor and were popping the balloons 😦 big meanies.

Yours truly was filmed dancing very embarrassingly on three separate occasions throughout the disco, may pop up on a German news channel near you (if you are in NRW).

Till next time party people!

Amanda

xox