Attack of the Anonymous Tomato Tossers
By Ashley Harrell
Sunday at 2 p.m., a phalanx of young scalawags armed with fresh, juicy produce descended on Warm Water Cove in Potrero Hill for San Francisco's first ever organized tomato fight. Why they had come to this particular spot at this particular time, nobody wanted to say.
"The Internet told me to," one guy offered, cryptically.
Apparently, a secret society's yahoo group was involved, and also an email of mysterious origin announcing the details of SF's first ever Tomatina (also the name of massive yearly tomato fight in Spain). The fight would last just 15 minutes, and there were three rules. Eye protection was necessary, cameramen were off-limits, and tomatoes must be squished in the hand before launch.
"Now some of you might think this is a waste of perfectly good tomatoes. No," the email went on to explain. "A waste of tomatoes would be giving them to a vegan cook so they can make sauce for their overcooked, gluten-free, expeller-pressed fettuccine. Either way the tomato is wasted, but at least you get SOME joy from the end result."
Around 2:30 p.m., somebody shot a tomato out of a potato gun and the carnage began. Tomatoes sailed in every direction, in many cases ricocheting off bodies with distinct thuds and leaving reddish, seedy stains on festive clothing, including one man's 90's-style orange jump suit.
The crueler participants nailed each other in the nether regions and rubbed tomato juice into faces and hair. But all that brutality didn't quite measure up to Tomatina (pictured below), which draws tens of thousands of people. Give it time, people. Give it time.
At the end of the fight, it appeared that a volcano filled with tomatoes had erupted nearby. As fighters toweled off and prepared for the bar, they expressed hopes that seagulls would go to town. One woman wasn't so sure, so she picked up a tomato and took a bite. "This is still good," she said. "I'll fuckin' eat it."
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