Food festivals have been around since man has been around and it’s no surprise we started looking for things to do with food other than eat them.
All over the world, there are festivals dedicated to food such as the yam festivals celebrated in Nigeria, just to mention a few.
While most of these festivals are celebrated to honor a particular food, some food festivals can be considered a bit weird. Here are some weird food festivals from around the world;
1) La Tomatina
Held in Buñol, Spain, La Tomatina is a food festival that is best described as a tomato food fight. This festival involves participants (who pay to get in by the way) engaging in a tomato fight where they throw tomatoes at themselves as some sort of entertainment.
La Tomatina is celebrated on the last Wednesday of each August and thousands troop in from around the world to attend. This festival will definitely not be fun for whoever has to clean the streets afterward.
2) Els Enfarinats festival
Celebrated on December 28 yearly in Spain, Els Enfarinats Festival is a 200-year-old festival where flour and eggs become ‘weapons of war’.
During this festival, participants pelt each other with flour and eggs on the streets. Els Enfarinats is celebrated to mark the Biblical story of King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents.
3) La Batalla de Vino
Also celebrated in Spain, La Batalla de Vino is another food festival that can be described as weird. For this festival, usually celebrated on the 29th of June, locals in La Rioja put on a white tee and a red scarf and spray red vino (wine) all over one another. They just gather, pop the corks, and start spraying one another.
The festival ends when all the bottles are empty. It is said that this weird festival started in the 13th century when this town – Haro and their neighbors had to lay out their boundaries twice a year if they didn’t want to become a part of the other town.
A breakdown in communication led to random flinging of wine at one another and they just continued doing that to date.
4) Ivrea Orange Fest
The Ivrea Orange Festival is another weird food festival. Celebrated in Italy, this festival involves locals gathering their oranges and throwing them at one another for no particular reason other than to celebrate this festival.
History says this all started in the Middle Ages when girls would throw oranges at the boys they like. The boys didn’t realize at the time that this was flirting and simply threw the oranges back at the girls…and so the Ivrea Orange Festival was born.
5) Cheese Rolling festival
The Cheese Rolling festival held in Gloucestershire, England is not only weird, but you will need some athletic energy if you want to emerge victorious as it is also a competition.
For this festival, a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is released down a big hill and then different runners topple, slide and hurl their way down the hill hoping to be the first to reach the bottom and claim the wheel as the prize.
There you have it, five weird food festivals around the world. Although these festivals are weird, there’s no denying that every participant definitely has fun partaking in them. It is no wonder they have lasted for years.
