World Disco Soup Day is a global event created by Slow Food Youth Network to shine a spotlight on food waste prevention. The Oak Park Farmers Market will be joining hundreds of events around the world on April 26 to make our Rainbow Soup recipe, which illustrates how easy it is to prevent food waste when we get creative in the kitchen. Free samples will be served! We’re partnering with Food Literacy Center, Oak Park Farmers Market and Root 64. 

We’ll celebrate and educate by cooking dishes with foods like potato skins and beet greens that we normally toss aside. The farmers market will be outfitted with signage educating customers about how to eat “fruit to root,” like making carrot top pesto, or using beet greens in pizza. We’ll also dance!

Every year, the world produces 2.24 billion pounds of waste. If we piled it all together, it would be taller than Mount Everest. Every year, year after year.

15% of the world’s food is lost once harvested and it never reaches the shops. Another 17% of food is wasted at retail and consumer level. (data: FAO) Reducing food waste means redistributing our resources to be able to feed the entire world population – we already produce enough food for 10 billion people!

Food loss and waste also account for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions! This means addressing food waste also means reducing carbon emissions and their dramatic consequences on our planet’s rising temperature.

How did it start?

Disco Soup started 9 years ago in Berlin, Germany, as Schnippeldisko, a ‘protest soup’, against food waste that fed 8000 people.

From then on, they started to spread across the world as a fun, meaningful way to bring this crisis into focus. Many different editions have taken place. Each Disco Soup event was individually run, relying on local volunteers to organize every detail, until in 2016, the Slow Food Youth Network Brazil organized a national Disco Soup Day. So, why not do the same internationally?