Who Cleans Up After The Tomato Smashing Festival?
Text by Sandwich
Photography by © Paola De Grenet
At the beginning of Lynne Ramsay’s 2008 film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton’s character, a harried mother who may have given birth to a devil child, is seen rising up from a cascade of ripe, red tomatoes. Her face depicts a moment of pure ecstasy, as she has the overripe fruit pelted at her body by the surrounding revellers.
The drudgery and torment of her life back home is a pale shadow of this moment of freedom, but which is also a momentary outlet of violence—albeit, violence of the fun variety. La Tomatina is an annual event in the sleepy Valencian burg of Buñol that has occurred annually on the last Wednesday in August since 1945 and, across a single short hour, a stock of inedible local tomatoes become the ammunition for one of the globe’s most epic and famous food fights.
This was all born out of an incident at a fancy-dress celebration when one participant became enraged when his costume fell apart and he was pelted with fruit and vegetables in a bid to calm him down. In art, it has been co-opted as an easy and exotic outlet for emotion. But the reality is quite different. Here, photojournalist Paola de Grenet captures the short window in which all the signs of fun, elation and chaos are hosed away, and normal life can resume anew...
While the sandwich is known as a distinctly American dish, some believe it’s actually a descendant of an English tea sandwich that originated during the Victorian era. BLT expert and author of The BLT Cookbook, Michele Jordan believes that the sandwich is a variation on the club sandwich. And that you can trace its roots to the US railways.
“Tracing it back doesn’t really lead to any solid information but the best thing I’ve come up with is we have to look to train service, where the club sandwich got really popular,” Jordan recently told me. “It seems to me that the BLT became a version of the club sandwich.”
In researching her 2003 book, Jordan says she came across what she believes is the first mention of a BLT sandwich in a 1903 Ladies Home Journal magazine article. But it could have been invented much earlier. People were baking bread in the US in the 1800s and the tomato started to gain in popularity in the early-to-mid 1800s as well. Pork was introduced to the New World in the 16th century. And mayonnaise was invented by the French in the 1700s and the first commercial mayonnaise was sold in the US in the early 1900s.
It’s fair to say an inventive individual might have put bacon, tomato, lettuce, mayonnaise and bread together before the 20th century, but Jordan argues it was most likely derived from the club sandwiches served as part of mid-to-late 19th century club car dining culture.
