Every August, the small town of Bunol, Spain, spends one hour pelting itself with roughly 145,000 kilograms of overripe tomatoes, and the cobblestones come out cleaner than they were before. This episode traces how the world's largest sanctioned food fight began in August 1945 when a parade participant dropped his giant papier-mache head, flew into a rage, and started hurling produce from a market stall, and how a group of young locals brought their own tomatoes the following year to do it again on purpose.

We follow the festival through its ban under Francisco Franco's dictatorship, the arrests of participants, and the 1957 mock tomato funeral with a marching band and a coffin that shamed the authorities into lifting the ban. Then we look at the television report that made it famous, the 2002 designation as a fiesta of international touris ...