It’s good enough to make you weep
Polish writer Stanislaw J Lec succinctly addressed this point when he famously asked: is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork? Progress is responsible for much that is of immense value - advances in healthcare alone have transformed the world. But it is also to blame for some of the worst things to happen - the proliferation of ever-deadlier weapons, for example and, closer to home, the despoiling of a beautiful coastline as it is taken over by shoreside development.
It sometimes seems that each step forward is followed by two steps back and it becomes easy to yearn for a past that, viewed through decaying memory banks, was simpler, less hectic, easier to understand and better to live in. Occasionally, though, there is a development that is indisputably progress in the best sense, a movement toward a better condition for everyone. Such a moment arrived this week with the revelation that New Zealand scientists have developed an onion that doesnt make you cry when you cut it up.
Bless them. Its early days - Crop and Food research scientist Colin Eady says it might be a decade before the tearless onion becomes the industry norm - but already the team has produced a version that doesnt cause tears when it is crushed. Cooks everywhere will be cheering, more so when they can get their hands on some. As anyone who has ever done it knows, there are few if any experiences in the kitchen as unpleasant as the stinging eyes brought on by peeling, slicing and dicing onions.
Its a testament to mankinds tenacity that in spite of this nasty side effect, cooks have stuck with onions for thousands of years. It is said that the workers who built Egypts pyramids might have been fed onions, that Roman gladiators were rubbed down with them to firm their muscles and that in the Middle Ages they were given as gifts and even handed over to pay the rent. Today they are used in many ways and in many kinds of cooked and fresh food, and wide health benefits are claimed for them including that they can combat the common cold, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
However, they remain difficult to prepare. There are techniques to minimise the ill-effects, such as cutting onions under running water or freezing them, and there are mild varieties that dont produce nearly as much of the discomfort caused by the diluted sulphuric acid that forms when onion gas reacts with water in the eye. But the stronger kinds are favoured for many recipes and, tests have shown, also have far greater medicinal properties than their weaker cousins. So its serious work that Dr Eady and his team are doing and, with world onion production sitting at around 64 million tonnes, it has the potential for a big international impact.
Advances such as this one are unlikely to take up much space in the history books, yet the positive difference that they make to everyday life gives them immense value. Like the flush toilet and the electric blanket, the tearless onion, if it proves as good as promised, is set to take away one more impediment to domestic bliss. Compared with so much else that has become prevalent simply because its fashionable and meets a need that has been created by marketing specialists, that really is progress. Now if Dr Eady and the team can only turn their attention to the final frontier, onion breath, theyll really be on to something.
