Onions and I, we have quite a history.
I've spent many years (by this I mean my whole life) feeling really, really particular about onions. And I would like to announce right now that I am NOT proud of it. Even when I was a faux-meat-loving vegan for awhile, even when I was vegetarian for a much longer while, I've never felt so strongly about not eating a certain food. It's been a bumpy road, but I'm here to tell you that things are getting better. In the past few years, I've really come around, and I'm trying to get away from my onion aversion. I am working on a new respect for this creature, this force, the Onion. It's insane, really -- there are some onion formats that I am currently so in love with that I would spread them on my body and eat them three times a day, but others still make me wince a little. But you should hear the whole story.
I need to start by saying I have absolutely no idea how or why I started the war. And that's the odd, odd thing with food relationships -- they are so complicated, and usually there is no logical explanation for our feelings about certain items. When it's something very potent or textural or overwhelmingly odorous, we have a bit more of an excuse. It just all seems especially strange when the Food In Question is something as benign as an onion. And it's even more ridiculous when you consider my first encounter. It all goes back to (you guessed it) my childhood. I'm certain my mother could give you a more complete play-by-play, but I'll see if I can muster up some sort of truth.
Okay, so it was the onions in the meatloaf. That's the first memory of feeling completely averse to a food. I saw the tiny, tiny onion bits inside the meatloaf, and I wanted to die. I couldn't stand the thought of those bits. They didn't taste like very much, but they were so obtrusive, and they froze me in my tracks. I refused to eat them. And I mean refused. Oh, my poor, poor mother, the abused chef. Just trying to put a dinner on the table, and look at what she gets! A total whiner. An onion-fearing, inconsolable lunatic at her table. Such abuse I inflicted, such unnecessary dinner table antics. Why did my parents keep me?
I could identify an onion a mile away. Okay, um, four miles away. There was no sneaking an onion by me. It couldn't be done. I would sort through my meatloaf with the hands of a tiny surgeon, reducing the whole thing to rubble on my plate. There were so many tiny pieces that I'd get exhausted halfway through and give up on the meatloaf completely. I remember wanting so badly to not be bothered by them, the awful onions. And, even then, I was truly confused about why I was so disturbed by them. I had no wretched history with onions. They had never done anything to me. At that point, I really hadn't ever even eaten one, for crying out loud! How on earth could I know that I didn't like it?
I'd sift through soup and spaghetti sauce, too -- anywhere there might be an onion was a place that onions needed to be extracted from. Raw, cooked...get it out of there! My mother was patient beyond belief. She was likely boiling on the inside, growling through clenched teeth to my father when I was out of earshot why won't she just eat the damn onions! But, with me she was patient, and when a fib didn't work (those aren't onions in the meatloaf, honey! They're crackers!) she obliged me and made some of the muffin-tin meatloaves without onions. She had read the books. She knew that it (supposedly) takes a child up to seventeen tries of a food before they like it. But I'm sure she had no idea that "seventeen tries" actually meant thirty-one years.
I didn't want anything to do with raw onions for years and years. Eventually, about a decade ago, I came to understand the scallion, and we've been madly in love for years. I've tried to get on board with the other kinds of raw onions, and discovered that they give me a horribly pained belly, although at this point it's much like the boy who cried wolf, and I'm not sure anyone actually believes me when I tell them that. I might not even believe myself. There are some extreme mind games involved with me and the raw onion. So acidic! So pokey inside my body! So smelly on the breath! So smelly on the hands! So offensive! So invasive! So pungent!
I recently strayed from this "cooked is okay" rule, though. I found myself at a restaurant in San Francisco, eating a really special pad Thai, complete with all these super-fresh, local vegetables. Amazing things lurked inside this dish. Including onions. Barely cooked white onions. And I turned into a baby. I gingerly poked at them, dragging them as inconspicuously as possible to the side of the plate. This is rude! I told myself over and over. Stop doing this! This is terrible restaurant behavior! But I couldn't stop. Granted, after all these years of onion avoidance, I have gotten quite adept at such surreptitious onion-relocating strategies. But I appalled myself. I ate one to confirm that I didn't like it. Crunch, crunch...uh, no. Not good. But why?! It didn't taste especially bad -- in fact, it was flavoring the dish really nicely. It crunched, but I typically love things that crunch. It didn't look scary like kimchi or oxtail or a clam does. There was only one explanation. I was at odds with only the idea of the onion. Just the idea of it. It wasn't even that much of a relief when I realized this, because I just felt like a superficial brat. I was back in high school, surrounded by the stabbing words of The Snotty Girls. Oh, Tammy, it's not that I don't like you, I just really hate cheerleaders and you happen to be one!
On one hand, I feel that in order to be a reasonable grown-up, I need to learn to (semi-happily) eat everything. Part of me really is convinced that when someone doesn't like something, they just haven't ever had it prepared the right way. On the other hand, I feel that I should move on, that I don't need to waste my time worrying about not liking a certain food. Everyone has foods they don't like, right? Our palates all react to flavors differently, right? Even Matthew, who will eat from the garbage can if you let him, cannot possibly stand to eat a beet or "the crunchy part of the lettuce", and my dad doesn't want to deal with couscous or orzo or tofu. My mom will not touch oatmeal with a ten-foot pole, and my brother does not want you to give him a sweet thing, not a cake or a chocolate or a candy. My aunt does not want to even talk about tomatoes, and I have several friends who can't even be in the same room as goat cheese. A friend of my mother's doesn't want garlic in anything, ever, and I had a friend in college who really didn't want to ever see any sort of white, creamy anything -- dressings, sauces, cheeses. Another friend won't eat a mussel to save her life (oh, wait, that's me) and another friend won't even think about eating anything that has been pickled. So I can have my onion policy, right? I am working on my redemption song. See?
Dear Onion,
I think you are really beautiful. I love your rings, and all the colors that you come in, especially purple. I like the way your layers peel away, and I like that there are so many metaphors in the world that use onions in order to teach us things. I appreciate that you have very large cells so that you can be easily examined with a low magnification, and I think it's pretty special that onions were even used in Egyptian burials and used for currency during the Middle Ages. Even though you make me cry when I cut you open, I have learned that you are only trying to protect yourself, and I guess that's okay with me. I like that you are very healthy, and extremely versatile. You are so neat, how you do all that growing underground and then you come up and say, What's up now, sucka! I think it's amazing that you have been growing in the world for so, so long, and I can store you for a long time, which is convenient. Even though you are toxic to most animals, you have a lot of human friends, so try not to worry so much, okay? I have had a hard time loving you in all your forms, but I am working on it. I hope you can understand.
Write back soon!
Love from Chicago!
xoxox
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