Last year, we couldn’t grow tomatoes. Our heirloom varieties looked good from the top—and rotted at the bottom. Our normally bulletproof beefsteak tomatoes grew spots and mold and the leaves shriveled. Our fancy heritage cherry tomatoes turned pitch black and tasted like rust remover. The Japanese beetles wouldn’t even eat them.
But this year, we are buried in tomatoes. Everything grew. The wooden racks we built for them bent and collapsed under the relentless weight of more and more tomatoes. We ate tomatoes right off the vine, fresh and delicious. We added them to pizzas and pasta. We gave tomatoes to friends and neighbors. We froze them. We canned them. Eventually, we discovered we had no more room for them. And still, the tomatoes kept coming.
Understand that I have been a lifelong member of the Clean Plate Club. To me, wasting food is a sin. My parents drummed that into our brains from an early age. And yet, when I saw all those ripe, red, juicy tomatoes multiplying before my very eyes, I couldn’t help thinking how satisfying it would be to hurl one against a tree and watch it splat!
Well, it may be a sin—but I’m not alone. Every year on the last Wednesday in August, the little village of Bunol, pop. 9,000, near Valencia, Spain stages the world’s largest food fight, La Tomatina. With tomatoes—120 metric tons of tomatoes. And it’s not a pretty sight. The narrow streets literally run red with tomato juice and pulp. Participants are drenched in tomato juice. They are slipping and falling into a river of red goo, tossing blobs playfully at each other (only squished tomatoes allowed—no whole fruit). From above, it looks like the aftermath of the bloodiest medieval battle in history. The festival is, I suppose, a goofy mockery of the horrors of war. And it’s one way to use up all those surplus tomatoes.
Nobody is sure how the La Tomatina tradition began but it may have started at the end of the second world war during a parade when somebody chucked a tomato at a bad musician. Now, Bunol’s tomato carnage in which no one escapes the red badge of battle is held in honor of the town’s patron saints, Luis Bertran and the Mare de Deu dels Desemparats which ironically translates as “Mother of God of the Defenseless”. The Tomatina tomato fight has become so popular that Bunol could no longer accommodate the 40,000 people who traveled from all over the world to throw tomatoes at each other. The town has had to limit participation to a lucky (?) 20,000.
Other towns stage their own, if less colorful, versions of food fight festivals. There is the Setsubun bean-throwing festival in Japan, celebrating the coming of spring. There is the grape throwing festival in Mallorca, Spain. And, of course the Great Fruitcake Toss in Manitou Springs, Colorado in which combatants hurl old, unwanted (and probably lethally hard) fruitcakes at each other which they doubtlessly re-use year after year because, as we all know, fruitcakes are indestructible and– need we mention? inedible.
Which brings us curiously to one of the only rules of the La Tomatina tomato festival: Don’t eat the tomatoes!