Disco Soup!

Last weekend, during Arome, the BHM department’s largest food festival of the year, SWAD shared Disco Soup with the college!

The Soup

Disco soup?

Let me explain… “Disco” is a play on the word discarded. And Disco Soup is a drive against food waste. The aim is to save perfectly good food produce from being unnecessarily discarded. Food is collected from farms with excess produce, supermarkets that have surplus at the end of the week, restaurants and hotels that reject certain produce due to noncompliance of the purchasing standards, etc. This food is collected and cooked into a soup and shared within the community.

This is a concept that was born within the Slow Food Youth Network (SFYN) in Germany and has since become popular with other branches of SFYN across the world.

The week before Arome, at an organic farming and terrace gardening fair the SWAD team met an organic producer named Srinivas Patil. His farm, Organic Options, grows an abundance of food produce, a lot of which his two small retail outlets do not currently have the capacity to sell. This leaves Mr. Patil with a lot of excess. This is the dilemma he approached us with. So we took this produce from him and made Disco Soup, as a way to start a discussion on food waste at our college.

One Mr. Sachin form Organic Options came to represent the producers

Mr. Patil had about fifteen medium pumpkins that he has no idea what to do with. He has sent some home with staff and used some in his own home, but there were still so many left! they were destined to go to waste. We asked him to send them over. He also sent some bunches of mint leaves. We transformed this produce into a refreshing pumpkin and mint soup, which we shared with everyone who passed the SWAD stall at the festival.

The soup was as well received as the concept. People were surprised and shocked to know that the vegetables that were used in this delicious soup would have ended up in the bin! We also initiated discussions about other points in the food cycle where a lot of unnecessary waste is created. The soup was over in the matter of an hour.

Speaking about the concept of Disco Soup to an international student who visited the stall and had some soup

This is SWAD’s first step in acting against food waste. We aim to hold more disco soup events, as well as start a project to connect sources of waste with people in need of food.