Inside a Peoplemeal.com Gathering | A Cinematic Story of Food, Strangers & Human Connection in a Modern Potluck Experience ‎

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‎The invitation arrived in my email box on a gray Thursday afternoon with the subject line:
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‎Peoplemeal.com
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‎Find Your Tribe
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‎Share Your Dish
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‎I almost deleted it, because I didn’t understand the purpose.
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‎Also, I didn’t really know the concept. A friend of a friend had forwarded it weeks ago. But something about the phrase stayed in my mind. Maybe it was the idea of strangers carrying food through the city toward the same direction, that didn’t attract me. Maybe I was just tired of evenings disappearing into screens.Saturday morning, I cooked too much roasted eggplant, packed it into a glass dish, and took the metro across town.
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‎The event was in a garden; I found it on https://peoplemeal.com
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‎Nearby the garden, I could hear people before I found the way — laughter, plates touching, music low in the background.
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‎There were folding tables filled with homemade food:
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‎• saffron rice,
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‎• noodles in paper trays,
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‎• burnt-looking lasagna someone apologized for too much,
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‎• tiny cakes dusted with sugar.
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‎At the far wall, a projector displayed slow-moving photographs:
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‎a woman swimming underwater,
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‎a boy asleep on a train,
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‎rain on neon streets.
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‎Nobody seemed to know exactly where to stand. That was the beauty of it.
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‎People drifted.
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‎I set down my eggplant beside someone’s handwritten label:
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‎“Please try the mushroom dumplings. My first attempt.”
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‎— Bring a dish, bring a story, meet new people.
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‎When the event ended, I went again to https://peoplemeal.com because I wonder if there’re similar events later in my area.
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‎Empty dishes sat everywhere like evidence of temporary community. The projector hummed softly. Someone played an old jazz song on their phone.
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‎Then we walked down the wet staircase into the midnight street carrying leftovers neither of us wanted, already talking as though the conversation had begun long before that night. You know what? I have found a musician who will become my saxophone teacher, since age 16, I want to learn saxophone, today I have found the master.
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‎Thank you PeopleMeal !
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‎John Stein, neat
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‎boy looking for neat things ..
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