Milwaukee’s Fourth Annual Tomato Romp!

They came in droves for a chance to hang out with friends and then throw a ripe tomato at them. Nestled safely off North Ave. in the parking lot between Beans and Barley, Great Lakes Futons, and Von Trier, almost 200 people embraced the spirit of the now annual event sponsored by local businesses and benefiting Feeding America.

The Tomato Romp, of course, is adopted from the famous (and much larger-scale) La Tomatina in Buñol, Spain in which participants are encouraged to grab the red fruit off trucks and hurl them at each other until the world is wet and gushy. The local version is roughly the same, with people watching safely from fenced sidelines sipping from Bloody Marys concocted in a hotly contested title fight held earlier in the day.

We took pictures to prove the excellence of the event; all photographs found below in the slide show and on our flickr account come from photo intern Matthew Dwyer.