165 The Onion!

The Ancient History of the ONION

Sometimes one keeps running into a subject for no seeming reason at all. That’s how I chose to give you the scoop on the popular vegetable--the onion--this week. 

A funny article about what one can do with an onion beside cook and eat it was on BoredomTherapy.com site recently. 

Then, I was flipping through some year or so old magazine in the doctor’s waiting room (don’t even remember the magazine) and there was a factoid about the world’s largest onion in the Guinness Book of World Records. 

Okay, kind of strange, but when I got home I found an unsolicited email from a farm in Vidalia, GA about how wonderful their onions are (yes, I do think they are the best.) Okay, three times in a period of less than a week. Time to research the onion; seems it was calling to me!

This is not likely to be my most popular blog, but I hope you find some of it curious and interesting! Next time you cut an onion maybe something here will make you smile through your tears.

Enough explanation! Here is what I have learned about the onion.

Onions are incredibly healthy (and tasty) as an addition to almost any meal. Humans have known this apparently for thousands of years. Bronze Age settlement excavations (5000 BCE) show remains of figs, dates, and onions. 

Egypt, too, was farming as early as 3000 BCE. In ancient Egypt not only were the onions a staple of the diet – eaten by the pyramid builders along with radishes (great breath, huh?!), the onion has been shown to be a symbol of worship as well as one of the forms of payment to the builders. Some archeologists posit that the onion’s spherical shape and its concentric rings show eternal life and were even used in burial ceremonies. Traces of onion were found in Ramses IV’s eye sockets.

The Greeks found the onion to have medicinal properties (from “Onions in the Middle Ages,” p. 6) to lighten the “blood’s balance” (whatever that might mean). Athletes’ diets were filled with onions and Roman gladiators rubbed their skin with onion to “make their muscles firmer.” [I did not make this stuff up. It seems so weird that it is likely true.]

On to the Middle Ages and the value of the onion persisted. The onion was so prized that onion bulbs were used to pay rent and were given as gifts. [Shaking my head--thinking next time I need a hostess gift, I’ll just grab an onion or two.] European doctors prescribed the onion to cure infertility in both women and animals, while Pre-Columbian Native American used the onion in making dyes, syrup, and poultice formations.

So today the world onion production is estimated at over 100 billion pounds a year. This calculates to about 13 ½ pounds per person. The National Onion Association says Libya has the highest consumption with 66.8 pounds per person. The NOA data shows that onions represent the third largest fresh vegetable industry in the U.S. producing 2 metric million tons annually. 

I looked up Pace Foods (we like their salsa) and found they use 21 million pounds of fresh onions annually.

Now as a wrap up on the onion history, onions are thought to have originated in Asia and were found at sites from about 3500 BC. Their durability during winter was the impetus that gave them their status as a long-lived food. It was noticed, too, that the thicker the onion skin, the more severe the winter. 

Parsley, although first found in the Mediterranean, was often combined with the onion to sweeten one’s breath. Is it irony that parsley is part of the hemlock family!

The favorite at our house is the Vidalia – that sweet Georgia onion and, on occasion, onion dip. We use these for almost all our onion eating. 

The basic tip for no-tears onion chopping is still grandmother’s suggestion to have a piece of bread sticking out of one’s mouth to catch the fumes before they get to eyes and nose. The chemical irritant is Syn-propanethial-S-oxide (which I did NOT RESEARCH).

You never know what new information can pop up any old time. Thanks for reading!

Glenne