- Do you like to eat onions as much as a Libyan does?
What do you know about the onion? We eat a lot of them so why not know a lot about them?
- Sliced onion can soothe insect bites and skin burns.
- On average, Americans each eat about 18.8 pounds of onions per year. In comparison, that’s 350 semi-truck loads of onions each day.
- New York was called the Big Onion before it was known as the Big Apple. They called it this because you could peel it off layer by layer without ever reaching the core. Did you know this about New York and the onion?
- You can eat parsley to get rid of onion breath.
- Because onions are one of the few vegetables that can be stored for the winter, their popularity rose right along with them.
- The Texas Sweet onion is the official state vegetable of Texas.
- An average onion has about 45 calories.
- More than 75% of the onions in the world’s production are
yellow onions. - The largest grown onion weighed 10 pounds and 14 ounces according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The grower was V. Throup from Silsden, England.
- Georgia’s official state vegetable is the Georgia Vidalia onion.
- During the Middle Ages, onions were used as currency, even to pay for things like rent, products, services and even gifts.
- In the United States, about 125,000 acres of onions are planted each year. Surprisingly, there are less than 1,000 onion farmers in the country. Does this surprise you about the onion and those who grow them?
- Onions are full of quercetin, a flavonoid antioxidant that shows powerful effects in people that are battling lung cancer. Onions are also beneficial to treating cataracts and can help with cardiovascular disease.
- Ancient Egyptians worshiped onions believing that the
spherical shape and concentric rings symbolize eternity. They even covered tombs of their rulers with onions and used them in burial rituals. Onions were also thought to help the dead succeed in the afterlife. - There are some vegetables that are good for dogs, healthy even. But onions aren’t one of them.
- Onions grow in the wild on almost every continent. This is a cool fun fact about the onion.
- Libya is the country that eats the most onions per capita. Each person in this country eats about 66.8 pounds of onions every year.
- An old English Rhyme states that the thickness of an
onion’s skin is a predictor of the winter season. A thinner skin means a mild winter is coming while a thicker skin indicates a rough winter is on its way. - The National Onion Association states that United States onion consumption has increased 50% in the last 20 years.
- It’s a law in Blue Hill, Nebraska, that no female wearing a “hat that would scare a timid person” is allowed to eat onions in public. What do you think of this funny legality about the onion?
- The most common colors of onions are yellow, red and white.
- Pace Foods, that makes Picante sauces and salsas, uses about 21 million pounds of onions every year.
- Onions date back to 5,000 BC, over 7,000 years ago, to the oldest known onion harvest.
- If you add crushed aspirin and water to sliced onions they are known as a folk treatment to cure warts.
- To cut down on crying while chopping an this vegetable, chill the onion and cut into the root end of the onion last. This is a great and useful fun fact about the onion!
- Onions can be strong weapons against osteoporosis as women go through menopause. Onions help to destroy osteoclasts which are bone cells that resorb bone tissue and weaken bones.
Did you learn anything new about the onion? Let me know in the comments!