Word: onion
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...weather-beaten white house behind the plaque has a "For Lease" sign planted out in front. The sign, too, is rusting. On the grass rests the wrapper from a bag of onion rings, and a discarded box of wild-cherry-flavored cough drops...
...everything the traffic will bear, all under one roof. One does not find, for instance, a record-and-tape store so much as one finds an establishment whose sign proffers: SWEET CORN, LOCAL GROWN. WE MAKE KEYS. Gasoline stations offer beer, shoes, crickets, night crawlers and, in season, onions. The onion accounts for $9 million worth of the local economy each year. The harvest ended last month...
About four centuries after Shakespeare wrote, "Eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath," Mose Coleman harvested the first Vidalia onion, ate it and found, among other things, that his breath would not fell a mule. That was in 1931, and Coleman, who is now 82, took his onion to a buyer for a food-store chain. "I pulled out my onion and my knife," he recalls, "and I ate it there in front of him. He'd never seen anything like it. There wasn't any tears coming out of my eyes...
...onion caught on around the South, but did not move outside the region unless Southerners felt the pull of wanderlust, taking with them strong opinions on what constituted a good onion: the Vidalia. Now stores from Manhattan to Miami, Los Angeles to Seattle, sell Vidalias, real and counterfeit. The growers and the Chamber of Commerce here say the real Vidalia is raised within a 35-mile radius of Vidalia. Growers who belong to the Chamber's tag program produce onions that are graded and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and bear a tag with the trademark Yumion...
...general assembly apparently disagrees. When the growers got a bill introduced earlier this year defining the growing area of the Vidalia, "We got a fast lesson in practical politics," says the Chamber's Walden. "What happened is, growers in other parts of the state got to smelling that onion, and it got to smelling like money. By the time the legislature got through with it, the growing area included half the state." The legislation died...