Plans for a Messy Fight Spur Concern of Harm, to the Battlefield

Jose Jordan/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images The tomato fight coming to Brooklyn on Saturday is based on the one shown here: La Tomatina, held every year in a small town in Spain.

On Friday, 40,000 pounds of tomatoes will be delivered to Floyd Bennett Field, the old municipal-airport-turned-park by Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn. There are no plans for a giant salad or a record-setting pasta sauce; these tomatoes will meet a more violent end, when up to 5,000 people are expected to pay $50 for the chance to hurl the fruit of the Solanum lycopersicum at one another.

Tomato Battle, a mess of a food fight that would make Bluto Blutarsky proud, makes its New York debut on Saturday at an outdoor space at Aviator Sports and Events Center at Floyd Bennett Field, after having played cities including Denver, San Diego and Portland, Ore. The concept was lifted from La Tomatina, a festival in the Spanish town of Buñol that attracts up to 50,000 people.

The biggest challenge for Tomato Battle, said Aaron Saari, chief operating officer of Massivo, the company that runs the events, is finding enough farmers and distributors with damaged and overripe tomatoes â€" Massivo uses only produce that “is going to be tossed otherwise.”

In New York, however, objections have come because Floyd Bennett Field, whose 1,400 acres include gardens, a nature trail and campgrounds (as well as the hulks of disused airplane hangars), is part of Gateway National Recreation Area.

Complaints arose on a Google group devoted to Jamaica Bay that the food would attract flies or damage the environment. Mr. Saari said that Aviator and Massivo had reviewed any potential environmental impact, adding that the post-event cleanup would leave the area “cleaner than it was before,” with all tomato waste composted.

That doesn’t make swallowing the Tomato Battle easier for critics who believe such events don’t belong in a national park. One writer online called it “an outrage and an insult,” while another said the government had hosted numerous meetings about “historical and recreational uses” for the land but never discussed this sort of event.

“It just seems like a bad public image” for the National Park Service “to allow such frivolity and silliness in a national park,” Don Riepe, the Jamaica Bay guardian for the American Littoral Society, wrote in an e-mail.

But Jaclyn Muns, the marketing manager at Aviator, a concessionaire that runs skating rinks, basketball courts and open-air events at Floyd Bennett, said to expect more silliness. This summer features a mud race and a race in which runners get doused with multicolor cornstarch. There will be perhaps a dozen events total, double last year’s tally. She argues that the whole area is a “hidden gem,” and these events introduce people to the national park.

Not all nature lovers oppose Tomato Battle. Adriann Musson, president of the Floyd Bennett Gardens Association, whose community garden at Floyd Bennett Field is the city’s largest, said she was happy to “let them have a good time and get their aggression out.”

None of the garden’s tomatoes will be tossed on Saturday, though, and not just because they aren’t ripe yet. “We donate our extras to City Harvest,” Ms. Musson said. “We give them 500 pounds of vegetables a year, as opposed to throwing them at each other.”