Imagine if you will, you’re enjoying a tasty burger, then suddenly you hit something crunchy and your mouth is filled with the flavour of an unwashed foot.
You just took a big bite out of an onion, a vegetable that our antiquated culinary minds can’t seem to leave behind.
The humble onion: a versatile little plant that can be used in countless dishes.
It is, however, in my honest opinion, the worst vegetable in existence.
Onions are believed to have come from Central Asia where people (with no sense of taste, apparently) began cultivating them.
The people who first dug up this smelly veggie and decided to take a bite and didn’t immediately spit it out were responsible for the next 5,000 years of food mistakes.
Sure, back then, we may not have had a lot to flavour our food, but surely, in modern times we have many other vegetables and spices that taste and smell so much better.
With the introduction to things like garlic, sea salt, jalapeños, oregano and dill to name a few, we should have left the onion by the wayside. A relic of a bygone age, like Spam and blood soup.
The onion has no place in a modern palette: it burns your eyes to cut it, it smells bad and has a taste to match.
People might say “you can just pick them off,” but I disagree, even after they’re gone, the flavour lingers. Like a horrible version of King Midas, everything the onion touches becomes tainted.
I have family that loves putting onions in nearly every home-made dish and insist that I will change my mind on onions someday. In my 24 years of life, my opinion on the stink orb has not budged.
The same family members swear by the healing powers of the mighty onion. Cut one in half and put in your bedroom and it will cure your cold. It apparently filters all the bad bacteria out of the room.
The time it takes for the onion to do its work, according to my family, is about two weeks. Which is ironically, roughly the same amount of time your body would take to naturally get rid of a cold.
Throughout history, onions have had significant cultural and practical value. Ancient Greek athletes would eat onions, drink onion juice and rub those little guys on their bodies. Onions were used as a medicinal treatment throughout history in India, China, Greece, ancient Rome and Egypt.
In Medieval times, onions were even given out as wedding gifts and used as rent payment.
But in modern times, we have so many better alternatives to the vegetable.
In nearly every one of its uses, we have been able to find better alternatives to this versatile, putrid plant.
It’s time we left this terrible plant in the past. It had its time and now we have to move on as a people.
