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Business and Japan

It happens to everybody cutting round onions - you weep, sob or cry. The stuff brings tears - used to anyway.



The leading Japanese food manufacturers that won an Ig Nobel Prize the year before last for discovering the enzyme that brings tears to your eyes when cutting round onions now claim to have succeeded in "culturing" round onions that never bring tears when cut. The product called "Smile ball" is already being test marketed.



The developers say the tearless onions can be eaten raw without being washed in water and still do not irritate.



Noriya Masamura of House Foods Groups Inc. says to NHK the "tearless" onion is not irritating and still retains the full taste of ordinary onion. He adds:



"We produce 5 - 6 tons in the first year and then step up production to 1,000 tons a year."



To put it a bit technically, the newly found enzyme was named lachrymatory-factor synthase: LFS. In the footnote of the prize-winning thesis reads:



"Don't cry for me: inhibiting the biosynthesis of lachrymatory factor could give rise to a no-more-tears formula for onions."



The production method for the "tearless" onion is duly patented. The enzyme gene now identified, nursery companies only need to select out of their hundreds of onions the one most feeble in enzymatic function to create "tearless" onion without recombining genes.



Procure funds amply, and we can now theoretically produce round onion that never makes you cry out loud.



The whole idea, however, reminds the skeptic of how apples have come to lose that apple-like flavor over the years of "selective breeding". Good old Jonathan, called Kogyoku in Japan, is practically the only apple that retains how the apple should taste.



The skeptic hope against hope that onion would never follow suit of apples. They would rather weep than lose the onion-ilke flavor.

