'World's biggest food fight': Google Doodle celebrates 70 years of La Tomatina festival

Google is known to mark important events from all over the world — from anniversaries of prominent people to festivals, popular and obscure — with its flamboyant doodles.

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

The Doodle depicts an animation of a group of people pelting each other with tomatoes from a large basket marked with a ‘G’. While it’s unfortunately not possible to actually pelt one of the sprites with virtual tomatoes, you can watch them scramble around as tomatoes splatter all around them.

La Tomatina is a food fight festival held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Bunol near Valencia in Spain. Thousands of people come from all over the world to be a part of what is called ‘World’s Biggest Food Fight’, according to the official website. More than one hundred metric tonnes of over-ripe tomatoes are thrown in the streets and on each other as part of this festival.

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. The men are said  grabbed tomatoes from a nearby vegetable stand and used the fruit as projectiles, according to The Mirror UK.

Bollywood fans will remember the festival from Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara where they shot an entire song sequence at the festival and we saw Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, Katrina Kaif and the rest of the cast being ‘Paint in Red.’ The song features on the festival’s website as well.