Kiwis create tear-free onion, now working on tear-free All Blacks

Onions.jpg

True story: up until about five minutes ago, I was toying with the idea of writing a book called, “Why onions make you cry, and other horror stories for children”. It was going to be a masterpiece of childhood fiction about an onion getting revenge on humankind. But now my plans for a best-selling children’s book are nothing more than pipedreams, and it’s all because of some stupid Kiwi scientists.

These scientists have figured out a way of genetically modifying an onion so that you can switch off the enzyme that makes you cry when you cut it open. They hope that they will be able to grow tearless onions and sell them within the next decade.

Considering that onions get their flavour from the same enzyme, I would assume that it would assume that their playing Onion-God (the villain in my story, cooincidentally) would take away the flavour. But they seem to think that the opposite will happen.According to Colin Eady, the senior NZ scientist working on the project: “We anticipate that the health and flavour profiles will actually be enhanced by what we’ve done. What we’re hoping is that we’ll essentially have a lot of the nice, sweet aromas associated with onions without that associated bitter, pungent, tear-producing factor.”

And so my kid’s book idea is ruined. Who’d buy a novel about onions making you cry when, by the time it’s actually written, onions won’t make you cry? It’s a sad day for me…

[Yahoo News via BoingBoing]


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