Tomatina Festival – The Weird Side of the Internet

Tomatina Festival – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Have you ever been in a food fight? Sadly, I never have. Or maybe not so sadly, since no food was wasted and the starving kids in China starved one fewer in my case. But I love the idea of a food fight. And I can only imagine the magnitude of a food fight that would be commemorated in a festival for eighty years, but that fight and that festival meet in Bunol, Spain for “Tomatina.”

What’s Tomatina about? It’s about tomatoes. It’s about twenty-two thousand entrants unto the field with 120 tons of overripe tomato to throw. Was this good “clean” fun, or a wasteful statement on largess?

Actually, it’s good, clean fun, because the specific tomatoes people throw aren’t edible, and they’re grown in the area for the festival.

There is, of course, one rule to the festival, and that is that you must squish the tomato before throwing it. Which is the number one reducer of black eyes in the event.

It’s organic, but thousands come from all over the world. And the festival itself copied to other cities, like London, Amsterdam, Sutamarchan, Colombia, and Hyderabad, India.

I know that damn well as a kid, under a hundred and one optimal conditions a food fight would have been a cherished memory. But imagining a whole festival? Can Americans just throw sh*t at each other for an hour in the streets of some village or town?

I ask because I think here, people would have to sign a waiver or something. And someone would spend three months pay on a spare room full of potatoes and an outdoor trebuchet going up against someone with a Supersoaker full of Balsamic vinegar. To be honest, if the waivers were okay, a Great American food fight could be cool. Farmers bring the stuff they can’t sell, and if you can make a great dish and then launch that dish across your neighbor’s front door, you get a tiara or something like that. Something made out of rock candy and ribbon candy, something appropro.

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