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Science

'Tear-Free' Onion in the Works 55

Posted by michael from the no-more-tears dept.
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?"
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'Tear-Free' Onion in the Works More

'Tear-Free' Onion in the Works

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  • Until we can buy these tearless onions, one tip (I've been told, I've never tried it) is that you can put a piece of bread in your mouth while you cut them. Or you could just gouge your eyes out of your sockets.
    As far as getting rid of the hair on your chest caused by onions:
    A Closer Shave: Man's Daily Search for Perfection [amazon.com]
    Norelco 8894XL Spectra James Bond Shaver with Polymer Display, Black [amazon.com]
    Conair HLM11CH Chrome Hot Lather Machine [amazon.com]

    (don't forget that I referred you)
    • Um..I'll keep the hair on my chest.

      My wife seems to love it.

    • 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 [amazon.com] - (link to Amazon, no affliate, nothing but net)

      • Re: candle trick (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @06:08PM (#4474283)
        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).
        • I know of vadalia onions...which are really sweet and taste great. I think they might not release as much acid like you were saying. One thing that isn't mentioned in this thread is cutting and onion under water. I know it may be a bit messy, but it works.

    • Re:Did you ever eat a snowball? ...Onions is all I (Score:5, Informative)

      by GusherJizmac ( 80976 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @03:11PM (#4472770) Homepage
      After you peel it, but before you cut it, you can rinse it off with water and that helps out quite a bit.
      • Even better:

        Someone once told me that the chemicals which cause tearing are most concentrated in the root of the onion.

        So, I cut that part off under running water. I also cut the top off with water, and do most of the peeling with the faucet on.

        The job goes quicker, the scraps find their way into the garbage disposal more quickly, and my hands don't smell like onion for the rest of the day.

        Since I started doing this, I've not have any problems cutting onions, unless they're particularly potent (and then, it's always worth the pain).

    • Re:Did you ever eat a snowball? ...Onions is all I (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gotih ( 167327 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @05:53AM (#4477252) Homepage
      i cut a lot of onions (? [foodnotbombs.org]) every week and after a while you get used to it. the problem is that when you cut the part of the onion with the roots sticking out the onion releases a chemical that (i'm told) is converted to sulfuric acid in your eye. it's not a lot of acid but enough to burn. but somehow i have become immune to the stuff.

      anyway, the best way to prevent crying when cutting onions is to refridgerate them before cutting -- i guess this keeps the nasty chemicals from being so volitile when you cut them.

      if that doesn't work wear swim goggles.

  • This is really, really stupid (Score:4, Funny)

    by L. VeGas ( 580015 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @02:48PM (#4472478) Homepage Journal
    Ok, so what's wrong with this world where people want to tear up their onions. And even if they do, SO WHAT! I say, let people tear 'em, rip 'em, shred 'em, even stomp on 'em if they want to. I mean, really!

  • hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dukebytes ( 525932 ) <dukebytes@@@yahoo...com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @02:52PM (#4472523) Homepage
    Is anyone else even a little worried about all of the genetically manipulated food that we eat? It kinda scares me.

    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

    • Re:hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Syncdata ( 596941 )
      I'm not against Genetically altered food, if it offers something legititely _good, such as rice modified to have vitamin C or A, or what have you. But a tearless onion? Will we be altering lemons, so the juice doesn't sting? A themepark filled with dinosaurs?
      I suppose what I find so worrisome is the casual modification of genetic material currently going on in the laboratories of the world.
      But then, Pinky and the brain was pretty funny.

      • Re:hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @04:38PM (#4473631)
        I'm not against Genetically altered food, if it offers something legititely _good, such as rice modified to have vitamin C or A, or what have you.

        The only thing you have to worry about is that most companies selling GM seeds make the plants unable to pass the modification on to future generations of seeds. This can be a problem if good, freely available species of plants get diluted or lost, and later the GM seeds become unavailable. You should necissarily have to worry about using GM foods, but you should be aware of the practices of the companies you are buying such foods from. The food itself may be better, but the overall situation may not be in your best interests.
        • A couple points to make:
          First of all the companies are trying to recoup their R&D costs (and make a profit). That seems perfectly fair to me. It either has to be done this way, or you can have a government funded research project to make certain GM foods royalty-patent-whatever free.

          Second of all, I think it's better the way they are created at the moment, that is, unable to reproduce. I don't want super-plants spreading all over the place (outside of farmers' fields) and destroying our eco-system.
          Just my $ 2e-2
          • First of all the companies are trying to recoup their R&D costs (and make a profit).

            I agree, but I think we need to look at the consequences of how we achieve the protection of profits we need to provide. This will make more sense in a moment I hope.

            Second of all, I think it's better the way they are created at the moment, that is, unable to reproduce. I don't want super-plants spreading all over the place (outside of farmers' fields) and destroying our eco-system.

            If they couldn't reproduce that would be better. The problem is that they CAN reproduce, but produce low quality seed. If you're a farmer that uses traditional seed, and your crop gets cross-polinated from your neighbors GM crop, your seed will produce inferior plants. That's a problem.
    • >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.

      Natural stuff? What do you mean by natural stuff?

      Seedless grapes, seedless bananas, and seedless oranges classify as 'unnatural' fruits, don't they?

    • Genetically Manipulated Foods... (Score:5, Informative)

      by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @06:37PM (#4474498)

      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

  • Very strange (Score:5, Funny)

    by Charlton Heston ( 588481 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @02:55PM (#4472571) Homepage
    The Onion [onion.com] always make me laugh, not cry.

  • Is this really worth it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Yuan-Lung ( 582630 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @02:59PM (#4472615)
    This seems to me is a whole lot of effort and resources allocated on something quiet irrelavent.

    There are already several well-known tricks that solve the onion slicing problem quiet well. Is it really neccessary to temper with onion's genetic makeup, and risk eating something that may have unforeseen effects?

    Genetically alter a produce to increase production and solve femine, I can understand, but just to make tear-free onions?

    PS:personally I go with a sharp knife for dicing onions. Works like a charm for me as long as I don't rub my eye while slicing them.

    • Yeah, the 'Sharp Knife' technique works every time. I personally use a Global Flexible Utility knife, so damned sharp the food almost parts before you start slicing. I also occasionally get small pieces of me entering the meal (so sharp you don't feel the cuts) which is a problem for a vegetarian...

  • How will it affect Homo Sapiens? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Timinithis ( 14891 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @03:06PM (#4472710) Homepage
    Dairy farmers have been giving hormones [usda.gov] 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 [www.useu.be] children reaching puberty at younger ages [eces.org] 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.

  • at work we use the ancient (Score:3, Interesting)

    by seann ( 307009 ) <notaku@gmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @03:08PM (#4472735) Homepage Journal
    "Ice the onions" technique
    I will have to try the mentioned "Bread in mouth" [slashdot.org] method.

  • Two sides to the issue (Score:5, Funny)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @03:25PM (#4472892) Journal
    My grandfather always used to tell me to eat onions because it would put hair on my chest (oh how he was right).

    Fortunately, RedWolves2's bio clarifies that he is, in fact, a man.

  • How about fart free beans? (Score:5, Funny)

    by macdaddy357 ( 582412 ) <macdaddy357@hotmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @03:45PM (#4473140)
    Tear free onions are nice, but fart free beans would be the greatest invention since sliced bread! People would line up to buy those.

    • Beans (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Guppy ( 12314 )
      "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 [beano.com]) 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.
    • if you cook the beans yourself, soak them overnight then dump out the water and rinse the beans. this helps though it does not completely eliminate the gassy results of bean consumption.

    • 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 [google.com] 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.

  • The tears are the best part (Score:5, Funny)

    by tchdab1 ( 164848 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @04:15PM (#4473400) Homepage
    Tear-free onion?
    How about a heartless artichoke?

  • Onions are already 'tear-free' (Score:4, Informative)

    by jungd ( 223367 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @05:26PM (#4473990)

    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.

  • Okay, you're going to laugh, but this worked really well for my housemate and me.

    (1) Buy a pair of clear swimming goggles.
    (2) Wear them.
    (3) PROFIT by the experience.

    One word of warning: With your eyes protected, you'll notice what the onion does to your sinuses whole hell of a lot more. (I bet you didn't even notice that onions did anything to your sinuses!)
    On the other hand, this is plenty more bearable than what it does to your eyes, so....

    • Look at it this way, though, it's another treatment for allergies, sinusitis, etc. But please, if you're making soup for somebody else, try to have clear sinuses (sini?) to begin with, lest they drain into the soup.

      (Eeew.)

  • One thing I read when passing by a copy of the book "Like Water For Chocolate" a while back is that if you put a bit of the onion's juice on your forehead it abates the tears. Testing on this has it that it works a bit, but perhaps the other methods mentioned in the comments here would work better.

    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.

  • Yeah, my old man says the same thing about coffee. If you think about it, it's just a phrase that falls under the category of things that will "make a man out of you".

  • Holding a saltine in my mouth seems to curb watery eyes. I look stupid but it works. How? Not really sure.

  • But, but it's already there! I mean, I can't tear myself free of The Onion [theonion.com]!

  • "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?"

    These tear free onions make your body hair fall off and your voice to go higher; upon which you must take up the name of your favorite drag queen.

  • "I now know why you humans cry." (Score:3, Informative)

    by netik ( 141046 ) on Saturday October 19, 2002 @06:07PM (#4486831) Homepage
    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.)

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