Has your mom or dad ever told you to stop playing with your food? No one says that to members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. They’re serious about playing with their food. They make music by playing instruments made from fresh vegetables. 2. This orchestra was founded in 1998. Its excellent musicians are not musicians by trade. “We all have musical experience in different projects, but none of us have finished classical musical training,” said Ernst Reitermaier, one of the group members. “In fact, group members have other careers that include medicine, sound engineering, computing, and art.” 3. Members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra are known for trying new ideas. They create and carve their own instruments just before each performance. Their creative vegetable instruments include carrot flutes, pumpkin bass drums, pepper bells, leek violins, just to name a few. Vegetable instruments sound best when they’re fresh. “You can’t play on a rotten cucumber,” one group member said. 4. Piringer, another group member, estimates that they need about 70 kilograms (about 155 pounds) of fresh vegetables for each concert. The vegetables are prepared just as your mom or dad would at home, with a basic kitchen knife, though sometimes the musicians use a hand drill. But you wouldn’t find these special vegetable instruments on your dinner plate. 5. The simplest instrument is a plain tomato, which can be pressed flat and squeezed together to make a special musical sound. More complicated instruments include the cucumber-phone. Made from a hollowed-out cucumber with finger holes, this unique instrument has a mouthpiece made of a carrot, and a pepper on the end. 6. It’s hard to imagine that instruments made of vegetables could really make music, but they do. They make sounds that can’t be easily produced by other instruments. Sometimes they sound like animals. At other times, the vegetables make abstract sounds—whirrs, clicks, and beeps that sound like music of the future. 7. Audiences all over Europe come to hear the “veggies” play. The orchestra tours in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. They have two CDs, and they’re also experimenting with a video. 8. According to Ernst, the group’s music is contemporary: “Our program automates sounds like electronic music,” he said. “Onion skins are the key. We use them for that digital, funny sound,” said Nikolaus, another group member. 9. What happens to all those vegetables when the show is over? The veggies employ a cook. At the end of the show, the cook makes a delicious soup that the audience and musicians enjoy together. It’s the perfect ending to an entertaining performance.