Does anyone know the history of the Bunol Tomato Carnival in the southeastern town of Bunol, Spain?

Spain tomato festival (Spain tomato festival) [speak][tE5mB:tEu, tE5meitEu][5festEvEl]

Time: The last Wednesday of August every year

Place: Bunol town in the Valencia region of Spain (also known as the town of Bunol)

Origin

The Tomato Festival in Spain began in the 1940s, and there are many versions of its origin, two of which are widely circulated. One is that a group of young people in a small town started a food fight in a square one day. The next year they met again and once again threw themselves at each other, and even the passers-by around them became targets of attack, which became the origin of today's Tomato Battle Carnival. Another version of the story is that one day a small band from the center of the city was waving their horns around, with the leader of the band blowing his horn up into the air. A group of young men had the idea of grabbing tomatoes and throwing them at the horn and competing with each other to see who could get them in, which led to the birth of the Tomato Festival.

Another version: In 1944, Sanchez, a young Buono resident, and a friend got into an argument with a musician in Buono's central plaza and threw tomatoes into the musician's trumpet. The next year, the young men met again in the plaza. This time they wanted to throw balloons at each other, but since they couldn't wait to get them, they casually grabbed the tomatoes around them and threw them. Passers-by joined them in the "battle" and a carnival like no other in the world was born.

The scene

There are countless festivals in Spain every year, and in a country where people are by nature passionate, festivals are an essential element of life. The Spanish people are enthusiastic and cheerful by nature, and they join in every festival with all their might, and the fire-like carnival scene can mobilize anyone's senses to enjoy it. Tomato Festival, is such a super cathartic game.

It is an annual folk festival in Spain, which is figuratively called "tomato war" by people who like it. On the day of the festival, thousands of local residents and foreign tourists take off their shirts and throw ripe, juicy tomatoes at other people, the rule of the game is that the tomatoes must be crushed before they can be shot, so as not to injure others. Of course, this also makes the tomatoes stickier. Soon, the tomato juice formed a knee-deep river through the streets of the town, while people's bodies and laughter were drowned in a sea of tomato red.

In recent years, according to local government statistics, the number of tourists coming from all over the world to attend this crazy festival has increased year by year, far outnumbering the locals. Because of this, the tomatoes provided by the government each year have also risen by the hundreds of tons. The annual event starts at noon, and after an hour of "battle", tons of tomatoes are thrown by the crowds, while locals turn on garden hoses to hose down the streets and people covered in tomato juice.

Tomatoes around the world

Tomatoes from Peru, South America, Central America can not be proved, but it is certain that the Incas and Aztecs in the Americas as early as 700 BC began to cultivate tomatoes, and tomatoes can be eaten time is the 16th century. The first eaters were the Mayans and the native peoples of the southern regions of Mexico, who called tomatoes tomatl. Culinary expert Andrews F. Smith says the first time humans ate tomatoes was after the arrival of Spanish colonists in the Americas.

After Spain conquered South America, the colonists spread tomatoes along their Caribbean colonies. They also brought tomatoes to the Philippines at the same time, and then tomatoes spread from the Philippines throughout Asia.

After the Spaniards brought the tomato to the Mediterranean region of Europe, the fiery-looking plant spread like wildfire in the fiery Mediterranean region, around 1540. By 1600, the Spanish must have been shyly savoring this delicacy for years. The earliest cookbook on tomatoes now found, published in 1692, was published in Naples, Italy.

The Italians had watched with suspicion as their Spanish neighbors ate the plant without fear, because, in their view, tomatoes, like other lycopene plants such as belladonna, were poisonous. The Italian farmers, not knowing much about theoretical things, let the silly pigs eat a few, all right, and the people went on to eat them. Later in Italy, the tomato then acquired a unique name: pomodoro, meaning golden apple.

The tomato did not reach England until after 1590. A quack doctor named Gerald Hebel knew that the Spaniards and Italians loved it, but he insisted that tomatoes were poisonous (note that the leaves and stems are still really poisonous), so the entire English public was kept away from the dish at banquets, and everyone just ate it privately and beautifully. It was only in the mid-eighteenth century, when all the British were good at it, that the Encyclopedia Britannica officially wrote that tomatoes had now become the main ingredient in the daily soups of the British.

Then tomatoes spread to North America, and Americans ate them, around 1750. It was still not eaten by many people, and people mainly used it as a decorative plant. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, ate it in Paris, and when he returned home he not only ate it, but also had his son-in-law, Tor, comment on it at the Agricultural Planting Conference, decrying the backward dietary and scientific culture of the United States. At the time, Americans ate tomatoes not as a vegetable, but only in the summer, because they believed that "eating them in the summer helps purify the blood."

An American doctor named John Cook Bernard comprehensively "developed" the theory of the medicinal use of tomatoes: tomatoes are a kind of medicine, very good medicine, the main treatment for dysentery, indigestion and other gastrointestinal disorders, and in 1830 published a book to introduce its pharmacology. One of the reasons the book went viral was because it was hilariously worded. After that, there were people selling tomato magic pills all over the streets like the Power Pills, and a lot of people really experienced its miraculous effect: tomatoes can really cure a lot of illnesses - of course, those are some minor illnesses that can be cured by just taking care of themselves. By 1840, Americans had begun to commonly take it to cure cravings.