Word: vidalia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Vidalia...
...Vidalia (pop. 12,500) is in a land of griddle-flat fields frying in the sun, above which flit innumerable gnats. Newcomers reveal their newness by slapping at the gnats. Natives just shrug and blow them away. It is a region in which people, upon taking leave of one another, say either "Better come go with us" or "Stay with us"-no matter whether the plural applies. The stranger who says "O.K." to either proposition is regarded...
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...
...Georgia 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...