Month: October 2019

Ah, the classic food fight. You may remember a classmate in middle school yelling, “Food fight!” across the school cafeteria followed by a wave of sandwich remnants and chunks of half eaten fruit crashing over everything in the room. Food fighting has been a way of expression, or even just fun, from protesting to just playing pranks on friends throughout history and in modern days. A festival in Spain, which has been adopted in other places around the world, takes food fights to a whole different level.“Tomatina” festival occurs every year on the last Wednesday of August in the small town of Buñol. Although the origins of this strange holiday are disputed, it is consistently recurrent and attracts many tourists each year. One theory is that this tradition dates back to the 1940s where angry citizens threw tomatoes at city councilmen. The other, much less historically based, is that it stemmed from friendly food fights between friends and families.The festival itself is essentially a large-scale food fight using overripe tomatoes. Now, at first thought, this may seem slightly repulsive, but it seems as though the people who participate in this odd tradition have a lot of fun and enjoy themselves amidst the sticky tomato juices.

This is in fact the biggest food fight in the world, with around 40,000 attendants showing up to participate. In terms of how many tomatoes are used, about 150,000 tomatoes, or 40 metric tons of them are thrown. That is more tomatoes than anyone would likely see in several lifetimes without participating in this activity. Although this may seem as an unnecessary amount of food waste, most of these tomatoes likely were never going to be eaten, due to the inferior quality and taste of the tomatoes, which are bought at a very cheap price from the Extremadura region of Spain.

In the week leading up to this massive food fight, there are many celebrations and people preparing for the festival. Parades, fireworks, and paella cooking contests are just a few of the festivities that happen prior to the main event. People also plan what they are going to wear to partake in the tomato throwing. It is suggested to wear swimming goggles or snorkeling gear to keep the mess out of your eyes and nose and many people tend to wear white t-shirts to track how many tomatoes they get on them or they wear bathing suits in order to reduce the amount of laundry that they have to do after essentially swimming in the tomatoes.

This being said, tomatoes are actually very good for the skin. Since they are a natural disinfectant, after participating, your skin will, yes, be covered in tomato, but also be cleansed of impurities. After the battle, the townspeople will hose down the streets, leaving almost no trace of the red juices that covered everything just hours before.

The need to acknowledge the childish urge to participate in a food fight apparently never subsides, as shown with this strange festival. So, next time you find yourself thinking about how nice it would feel to throw an item of food at your friend, take a trip to Buñol, Spain and become a kid again.

Now, you’ve probably heard of “color runs”, where you run a short distance, usually a 5k, and the race facilitators throw vibrantly colored dust at you as you run by. These colored powders are very entertaining to play around with, especially during these runs, but they are not just dyes to make running “fun”—they actually stem from a practice in the Hindu culture.Holi, considered one of the most celebrated and revered festivals in India, is essentially a celebratory color war between family members and loved ones. According to an article describing Holi, “Everybody wants to be the first one to color the other. In the ensuing battle of colors, everybody is drowned not just in colors of gulal but also in love and mirth”.

This love-filled festival originated as a combination of mythological stories. The Story of Holika and the Story of Radha and Krishan both gave rise to elements of this celebration. The Story of Holika influenced this day by contributing the celebration of good over evil. Thus, the celebration of Holi is always marked with an extremely positive connotation and when Holi is mentioned, most people who know about it will light up with a smile due to the positive mood about the celebration. The Story of Radha and Krishan explains the element of spreading color as a sign of love, which in essence, is the entire holiday itself. Holi also celebrates the coming of spring and the harvest, which is very important to the entire country of India, as their history is mostly agricultural.

Although the history is steadfast and the practice is widely accepted, the vibrantly colored powder used may seem unsettling to some people. A common question people ask when they see pictures of people celebrating Holi are “is the color and dye safe?” Originally, these dyes were made from various plant sources. For example, the color green was from the ground neem leaf, the colors yellow and red were from turmeric, the color blue came from indigo, and charcoal produced the color black. These all-natural sources of color were non-toxic, and people knew where they came from. In modern days with increased technology and more intense chemistry, these dyes became synthesized, and could be toxic in some cases. “Gulal”, a modern, mostly benign dye is made out of 95% cornstarch and 5% synthetic dyes. This blend, known as FD&C in the United States, is what adds color to multicolored candy, so it is safe. But, lower quality dyes that sell for cheaper prices entice some customers. These dyes contain harmful ingredients like copper sulfate, mercury sulfide, chromium iodide, lead oxide, and aluminum bromide. Such chemicals cause symptoms such as skin lesions, burning, and eye irritation among other health problems. So, one must be careful when purchasing the dye to make sure none of these painful consequences arise on what is supposed to be a happy, joyful, pain-free celebration.

Some may think that these color runs exploit the Hindu culture, which is in part true. The symbolic meals and cultural significance of Holi are both lost in this new way of marketing a 5k to the general public. But, the theme of gathering together friends and being joyful is not lost, which is the main theme of Holi. In order to lessen the feeling of cultural appropriation, companies promoting these color runs could provide a brief background of Holi, so that participants around the world would become familiar with this amazingly positive festival.