Things get massively messy at Brooklyn’s first ever Tomato Battle

This past Saturday, thousands rolled into Floyd Bennett Field by to participate the first of what we hope will be a grand tradition – the Tomato Battle. Inspired in part by La Tomatilla, a tomato fight that’s been dominating the streets of Buñol, Spain for the past 50 years, the Tomato Battle has taken ye olde Spanish tradition and brought it stateside with beer, music, and hot dogs. This is America after all.

The sounds of Bruno Mars could be heard echoing from the festival ground, over the inexplicable Nesquik tent and through the bleachers, as busload after busload of tomato warriors approached Floyd Bennett Field. The school buses, which picked up from the end of the 2/5, line ventured deep into Brooklyn, and as the sky opened up and the field spread out before us, those clad in goggles, white t-shirts, and bad-ass attitudes all simultaneously prepared to get covered in red goop.

On this giant field deep in Flatbush lay a million things we never could have imagined, including – but not limited to – a costume contest, in which contestants dressed up as Vikings, turtles, and superheroes, but curiously, not tomatoes. But there was this guy:

And a banana drinking a beer:

There was also a mechanical bull that sat on the ground the whole time:

And, uh, this guy:

What this had to do with tomatoes, we may never know. But what we do know is that there were 300,000 pounds of tomatoes, thousands of people, and two solid hours of marinara madness under the wide, open sky.

And as the air filled with the smells of fresh salsa and sunblock, we found that there was the good:

And the not-so-good:

But in the end, we found love in a soapless place.

And we can’t wait to go back.