‘World’s biggest food fight’: Google Doodle celebrates 70 years of La Tomatina

Wednesday’s Google Doodle celebrates the 70th anniversary of the world’s largest food fight: The La Tomatina festival in Spain.

Once every year, for about an hour on the last Wednesday of August, thousands of people descend on the town of Buñol in eastern Spain to pelt each other with tomatoes as part of La Tomatina festival.

The 2015 tomato fight and celebration gets underway at 11 a.m.

Seventy years on, and the rules are simple: make sure you squash your tomatoes before you throw them, give way to lorries, don’t rip T-shirts, and stop when you’re told to. A challenger, definitely someone with a whole lot of upper body strength, climbs his way to the top to secure the ham.

The Google Doodle created by Nate Swinehart captures the energy of La Tomatina festival with an animation that shows a truck full of tomatoes and people throwing tomatoes on each other.

The festival is believed to have originated in 1945 when a group of young men staged a protest in the town’s main square during the parade of gigantes y cabezudos. The participant flew into a fit of rage and started to hit everything in his path. There was a market stall of vegetables that fell victim to what soon became a furious crowd.

However, back in India, especially in Karnataka, the government banned the hosting of such a Tomatina event in Bangalore and Mysore, after some private organizers tried to organize it when the then Chief Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda defended the ban saying: “In the name of “La Tomatina” festival, permission should not be granted to waste tomatoes”. The authorities did try to dissolve it a few times but it finally became an official festival in 1957.