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'Tear-Free' Onion in the Works
RedWolves2 writes "CNN has an article about how scientists in Japan may have discovered a way to make onions easy on the eyes without taking away from the taste. My grandfather always used to tell me to eat onions because it would put hair on my chest (oh how he was right). I wonder if this new 'tear-free' onion would work in the same way?"
You can also burn a candle. That keeps your eyes from tearing as well. I am not sure why, but it works. For a book on making your own candles, click here - (link to Amazon, no affliate, nothing but net)
After you peel it, but before you cut it, you can rinse it off with water and that helps out quite a bit.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
When fresh, most onions are already tear-free. Its only if you leave them sitting around for 3-4 days that they start to slowly decompose and produce the chemicals that cause tearing.
Perhaps a better solution would be to improve the terrible quality of packaging, distribution and inventory management of most retailers of onions so that consumers can get them fresh. This would obviously benefit almost all other produce as well.
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Most of the foods eat have been genetically manipulated the old fashioned way - Selective breeding.
Plants have been changed to have bigger yeilds that ripen at the same time. In some cases (such as corn) the differences between the domesticated version and the wild cousin is drastic. Plants also have been manipulated to remove genes that cause bitterness.
Animals have been changed to be larger, slower, dumber and to carry more meat on their frame.
The problem is that the words 'Genetically Modified' scares a lot of people (like the words 'Nuclear' and 'Radiation'). But there is a whole world of difference between transferring genes from two unrelated organisms and removing or enhancing the genes of a single organism.
I don't see anything wrong with enhancing already existing genes, or removing genes that provide undesirable traits in our food. What you find in the supermarket is different from what you'll find in the wild. Going back to the selective-breeding analogy, nobody has a problem with seedless grapes. There's not much of a difference between finding a random seedless mutation and making a seedless mutation.
Switching genes between organisms are another story. I don't have a problem with adding vitamins to plants that normally lack them. (Adding vitamin A to rice could reduce a lot of blindness, for example). Other cases need a closer look though.Then again, if you want to worry, probably massively dosing our livestock with antibiotics will hurt us more in the long run.
Just my 2 zorkmids,
Dasunt
But why "descent" an onion? It seems to me that this would remove some of the character from the onion, even if they did have a way to do it without removing the flavor.
Perhaps instead they could work on garlic that doesn't give you breath bad enough to slay dragons with.
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You cry when cutting onions because you cut through the cellular walls of the onion, releasing pyruvic acid and sulfur compounds (like allyl sulfide) which combines with enzymes in your eyes to form a mild form of sulfuric acid.
Cutting with a serrated knife or dull knife cuts through more cells, which releases more of the compounds, and causes more tears.
All of the silly things listed here (putting juice on your forehead, bread in the mouth, etc.) won't stop this from happening. Only swimming goggles, using a sharp knife, and fresh onions will reduce the tears.
(Note this doesn't happen with sweet onions, which contain very little pyruvic acid.)