I Love Eating Raw Onions. Turns Out Many Readers Do, Too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/insider/raw-onions-readers.html

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Recently, with the self-annihilative bravado of a true fanatic, I wrote a 900-word encomium on the joys of eating red onions raw, in all their pungent, elemental glory, for the New York Times Magazine’s Letter of Recommendation column.

Post-publication, I predicted that maybe a few brave readers would join in agreement. But I was expecting mostly just reactions of distaste and disgust. What I did not expect was the overwhelmingly emotional response it elicited in so many for whom onions seemed to have unlocked an outpouring of memories.

By the end of the first day, the comments section had transformed into a cathartic place, as readers from places as varied as France, Hungary, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia and Switzerland (to name a few) swapped stories of all the myriad ways in which their fathers, uncles, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, husbands and lovers had eaten raw onions through war, famine, escape, the Depression and happier times.

The idea for the piece began in January 2020. I was late meeting my friend for lunch in the cafeteria on the 14th floor of our New York office because I had been picking out the red onions from the salad in the buffet. We laughed at the reason for my tardiness and I mentioned, half-kidding, that my goal was to one day write a deranged 900 words on how much I love the red onion. What started as a joke soon became a fixation.

Two months ago, I went on a date (at least I think it was?) to an Indian restaurant, before which I had been instructed by multiple concerned friends to avoid indulging in my usual habit of asking for onions on the side. It was sound advice, given with generosity. Did I listen to it? Absolutely not.

Contrary to the warnings I’d been issued, my kind dinner companion seemed unfazed, which I took as a sign to stop wavering and officially propose the idea, sending my editor a frenetic email later that night. I pitched it as a Letter of Recommendation because the column embodies a certain mischief, and it is unafraid of going deep into the more confusing of our human impulses (past editions include an ode to keeping a dozen snails as pets). In the same spirit of chaos, my full-throated declaration of love for this allium got an enthusiastic approval from the magazine’s editors, and the draft gathering dust for over a year was suddenly out of my hands.

Almost every day of the past three weeks since its publishing, I’ve woken up to messages from readers confessing that they, too, find the smell of bananas vile (you’re not alone!). Others have hesitantly tried my combination of red onion, lemon juice and salt on white bread and emailed me to say I have changed their lives and their definitions of a midday snack (you’re welcome!). The occasional skeptic demanded to know which other two vegetables I can bring myself to eat. (I will be revealing no such thing, but I hope they do continue guessing!)

I began writing the column as an inside joke with myself, to gently ridicule both my self-imposed dietary limitations and my extreme dedication to one edible member of the Amaryllidaceae family. But the more I thought about it, the more I began interrogating how vital a part of my life red onions had been. Thinking on the butchery inherent in the preparation of onions — from the peeling apart of their fragile papery skin and the violence of dicing the bulb to the scent that would linger on my hands for hours afterward — led me to a different realization. To me, the way the onion pulsates with sensation and discomfort in equal parts is a reminder that to be alive is to revel in both. To eat an onion raw is to experience life itself on a microcosmic plane, complete with all the detritus, essences and odors that make up its presence.

As novelists, philosophers, painters, poets and now over four hundred fervent commenters on The Times’s website will tell you, a world without onions is a colorless, tasteless and joyless one. And they are right.

Iva Dixit is a staff editor at The New York Times Magazine.