Slashdot Mirror
'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?"
I try to go with natural stuff when I can. But I know that we buy this kind of modern food all the time, without even knowing it.
Something to think about.
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
Dairy farmers have been giving hormones to dairy cows to produce more milk, and beef farmers have been giving to shorten the time to market for poultry. What we see as a result, are more and more children reaching puberty at younger ages and appearing older than they are...yes there is some creedence to the old joke "Your Honor, she looked eighteen!" Will a tearless onion mean we will eventually loose the ability to tear ourselves? I doubt it, but what ever change they make in the onion will eventually make a change in us.
Sig? What's a Sig?
"Ice the onions" technique
I will have to try the mentioned "Bread in mouth" method.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
This works because the reason onions cause people to tear up is because of the sulphur content of the onion. The candle will burn up some of the sulphur, thus reducing the reaction. This doesn't always work, but it certainly helps.
There's already a low-sulphur type of onion (I forget the name - but it's a number that tells farmers when to plant it (the date)) - but it's hard to find (in fact, I've never actually SEEN it at a grocery store).
"Tear free onions are nice, but fart free beans would be the greatest invention since sliced bread! People would line up to buy those."
A number of decades ago, there was an attempt to do exactly that, using traditional breeding methods to reduce the content of gas-producing raffinose and other oligosaccharides. The attempt was successful only up to a point -- apparently, a minimum amount of sugars were required by the seed, since when the concentration dropped too low, they stopped germinating. You could still propagate the plants by cloning, but this was impractical use in agriculture for a commodity crop like beans.
I've been thinking that with modern genetic engineering techniques it may be possible -- perhaps include an enzyme (like the galactosidase in Beano) that would break down the sugar, either before maturation, or during soaking before cooking. Another approach might be to replace the sugar-producing pathways to use another carbohydrate digestible by humans. The first would probably be easiest from an engineering standpoint (one single gene with proper regulation might do it), while the second might be much harder -- the longest functional pathway introduction I've heard of is the three-step one in golden rice, and that took years of work.
Some beans make some people fart. This happens when the body does not have available certain enzymes necessary to digest some of the starches in the beans. This seems to be universal in the American continents (most of us know the "Beans, beans, good for your heart..." rhyme). This is because genewise nearly all of us are from somewhere else--Asia or Europe. We mostly eat the beans that grow in this hemisphere (kidney, navy, pinto, etc...). Our European ancestors killed off the indigenous peoples, and now we're stuck with the indigenous peoples' beans! The remaining indigenous people do not have any problems digesting the varieties of beans that exist in this hemisphere because long ago nature gave them the means to digest these beans.
If you are of European or Asian descent, your body can digest the beans that your ancestors have eaten for thousands of years: soy, garbanzo, lentil, fava, dal, adzuki, mung, etc... without significant gas problems. Some of these beans--garbanzo and dal--may cause a little bit of gas regardless, but this can be headed off by adding a slight amount of asafoetida to the dish just before serving. This pungent herbal resin contains an enzyme suitable for gas-free digestion. Interestingly, the science of Ayurveda made this discovery thousands of years ago, rendering baseless the perceived need for interkingdom transgenic manipulation of bean crops.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"