
According to this Wikipedia article…
La Tomatina is a food fight festival held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region of Spain. Tens of thousands of participants come from all over the world to fight in a brutal battle where more than one hundred metric tons of over-ripe tomatoes are thrown in the streets.
The week-long festival features music, parades, dancing, and fireworks. On the night before the tomato fight, participants of the festival compete in a paella cooking contest.
So today is the day, and here is a video of it from the Grauniad…
Does this sound like fun to you?

I t looks like they had fun but I wonder what people in Africa, South America, or India would think of people wasting thousands of kilos of tomatoes for fun….
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I’ve seen something on this, on Globe Trekker, a youth-oriented travel show I see once in a while.
I’d be more interested in the paella, muself — the presenter yelped pretty loudly when she got hit, and it looked slippery as hell!
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Hit by the tomatoes, that is, NOT the paella! LOL
BTW, anyone got a good simple paella recipe that doesn’t require the big wide pan? 😉
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Yes, it looks like “fun”, but there are a lot of hungry people in the world. Think of all the spaghetti sauce that gets wasted. MMM, spaghetti. Paella, too. Simple paella without the wide pan? Phillistine!
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As I watched the clip, the statement “Thousands of people” was there. I started thinking, “It looks like thousands of guys, actually” but then I saw there were gals in there.
Personally, I am not that big on food fights, but it looked like the participants were having a wonderful time.
Yes, there was food wasted, but over ripe tomatoes don’t travel very well and they probably wouldn’t have done much good to the starving by the time they got anywhere where they were needed.
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You’d think that since this village apparently ends up with more than a hundred metric tons of over-ripe tomatoes every year they’d have opened up a tomato canning factory by now.
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I saw some footage of this way over here in Canada. Madcap Spaniards, is all I can say… but whatever gets you through the night…..it’s alright. Har!
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