Ask anyone nowadays about what an onion is and you’ll find that person, even if that person is a preening senator, does not know. Yet, he or she goes on talking about onions.
Excuse the scorn here, but you’ll understand in a jiffy.
Anyway, once senators and current events commentators get over their shock at the scarcity and prices of onions, they are stuck with nothing left to say about it.
Resourceful senators, however, snuck the ensuing silence by sneaking in suggestions about the many ways of sautéing shadowy onion smugglers, who, if you notice closely, are inexplicably never publicly named.
But that’s all boring. It isn’t in keeping with the season’s lighthearted mood.
This means we prefer regaling ourselves on onion trivia rather than going bonkers arguing farming or smuggling policies or other serious whatnots.
Getting the ball rolling then on our onion romp is to quickly ask the obvious question about onions: Why does slicing up lots of allium cepa (the scientific name for onion) get us literally shedding tears?
Figuratively speaking, why onions make us cry these inflationary days signals the thinness of our wallets… Oops, that’s non-trivial. Sorry.
Anyway, science says we get a good cry from onions since it is the only way we protect our eyes from irritants in the air. And, in the case of our bulbous onion, the sulfuric compound is released once it’s mangled on the chopping board.
To cut down on the crying, curious scientists suggest chilling first the onion in the refrigerator. Don’t also get into the habit of cutting the onion’s root end first too.
Nonetheless, one probably deserves tears since the only reason for slicing or peeling onions is the fact that the onion has proven its weight in gold to our taste buds. It’s a no-pain no-gain tradeoff.
As to what an onion essentially does to food, American writer Elizabeth Robbins Pennell says it best: “Banish (the onion) from the kitchen and the pleasure flies with it. Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest delicacy to hopeless insipidity, and dinner to despair.”
There are, of course, other reasons for using onions other than pleasuring taste buds.
Curiously, one of them is the social media claim that placing onion slices under the soles of the feet is a cure for colds and coughs and lately, even, the Covid-19 virus.
Go easy on those false social media claims, however.
Such claims are often debunked as fake news even by charitable alternative medicine experts.
At any rate, we can’t prosecute our social media era’s penchant for fakery as the only one guilty when it comes to the onion’s wild health claims.
Throughout eons, many believed the onion is effective against evil spirits, disease and even Biblical serpents.
Natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, for instance, noted that for ancient Romans onions soothed toothaches, aided sleep and cured dysentery.
With the weight of millennia, it doesn’t take imaginative somersaults to believe, up to now, onions are handy against supernatural creatures or illness.
Still, modern medical science has found out onions are powerful antiseptics and scare off bacteria.
Anyway, the onion’s circular shape and many layers also caused philosophical or religious meanings.
Ancient Egyptians saw the onion’s circular shape and many layers as symbols of eternity; while India’s ancient religions had it that since onions have no central core or pit around which the various layers form that meant all material things are temporary and that everything in the universe is connected.
But, if you just want something folksy, modern Greeks believe the onion brings good luck and fertility. So much so that on New Year’s Eve, they hang onion bundles above their doors to invite prosperity in.
Which is probably why I’m so onion-skinned about pricey onions hereabouts. I just can’t hang them above the door to rot.
Email: nevqjr@ yahoo.com.ph