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If you’ve ever had to chop an onion, you probably know that it’s one of
the most annoying cooking experiences. It just fills your eyes with
tears and, apart from wearing goggles, there’s not too much you can do
about it. Scientists and farmers have been working on a solution to this
problem for decades, and they’ve apparently come up with a tearless
onion.
Called the “Sunion”, this new vegetable is the result of a natural
cross-breeding program that’s been going on farms in Nevada and
Washington since the 1980s, which should put consumers worried about
genetically-modified produce at ease. It’s supposedly a sweet,
mild-tasting onion that doesn’t leave that strong, pungent aftertaste,
but what really sets it apart from most other onion varieties is that it
doesn’t cause teary eyes when it’s chopped.
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When you cut into a normal onion, it releases a volatile compound called
lachrymatory-factor synthase, and when that hits your eyes, your body
produces tears to reduce irritation. Now, the interesting thing about
regular onions is that the amounts of lachrymatory-factor synthase
increase the longer the vegetables are stored, so the older they, the
more you cry. In Sunions, on the other hand, the levels of that annoying
volatile compound drop the more time goes by, until it lo longer has any
effect on your eyes when you cut it.
That’s what Sunion growers are claiming anyway, but reports from those
lucky enough to have tried them seem to confirm these claims. The
Huffington Post had three of its reporters chop some Sunions, and
apparently, none of them shed a single tear. According to the Washington
Post, they don’t have the pungency of regular onions and are so sweet
that you can eat them “like popcorn”.
So the good news is that tearless onions are now a real thing. The bad
news is that they are currently only grown in Washington and Nevada, and
even though they are sold nationwide, they are still in relatively short
supply. The first Sunion batches hit the shelves of grocery stores in
December, but we’ll probably start seeing them in most grocery shops and
supermarkets in the next few years, as more people learn about them.
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“Sunions growers are currently working diligently with stores and
supermarkets across the country to find the best locations to offer this
groundbreaking product,” a spokesperson for the growers said.
Interestingly, even though Sunions are being marketed as the world’s
first tearless onions, back in 2015, we wrote about a similar creation
from Japanese company House Foods Group. They claimed to have also
created the world’s first “tear-free” onion, by disabling the compounds
that the popular vegetable releases when chopped. However, they
irradiated the onions to do it, which was bound to keep some consumers
away. |