In Georgia: Onion, Onion Is All the Word

By Gregory Jaynes

Bill Ledford, editor of the weekly paper in Vidalia, Ga., popped into the Vidalia Chamber of Commerce the other day with an idea about a porcelain onion. He told Dick Walden, the executive vice president of the Chamber, that he had met an artist in Charleston, S.C., and that he harbored a notion to commission her to fire him up some onions. "She makes squash, beans, everything," said Ledford, a little excitement rising in his voice. "She even makes an onion," he continued, "but it doesn't look like our onion. It's not flat and squatty enough."

Ledford, his eye on a buck, would like to market the artificial onion. The thing was, he explained, he wanted to put the registered trademark of the Vidalia sweet onion, a cartoonish character called the Yumion (sort of the Pillsbury Doughboy of the onion racket), on his product, and for that he needed permission from the Chamber. Walden said he would bring it up at the next board meeting, but he suspected Ledford "could bank on it." The editor bounded out, a happy man.

Onion, onion, onion is all the word around here. If one has not yet heard of the Vidalia sweet onion, one will. In the past few years, knowledge of its succulence has table-hopped through gourmet circles all over the land. The Vidalia (pronounced Vy-dale-yuh) is status, and with its fame has come its nemesis: imitators. "The imitators are unscrupulous," says Walden. "I fully expect to hear somebody's packaging cabbages out there and calling them Vidalia onions."

Jody Powell, writing in the Dallas Times Herald, puts the blame for the rise of onion fraud partly on the Carter Administration: "It started in 1977 when we Georgians descended on Washington and were overheard whispering at embassy receptions, state dinners and Cabinet meetings about suppliers, shipments and prospects for the year's crop. This attracted the attention of gossip columnists and other riffraff. Soon Vidalias were appearing on the shelves of the Georgetown Safeway, the supermarket of the elite where you're embarrassed to shop if you're not wearing tennis togs or jodhpurs, depending on the season."

Dealers from Alabama, Florida, Texas and other parts of Georgia are marketing their onions as Vidalia onions. The reason is simple: the Vidalia, because it is mild and because it has become enormously popular, fetches as much as three times the price of ordinary onions. The Vidalia is a yellow Granex type F-1 hybrid, a variety grown throughout the country. Grown elsewhere, however, the same onion can bring tears to the eyes. Grown here, it is called sweet--and is. The former presidential press secretary contends it will not make "your nose run, your heart burn, or your sweetheart gag." (In fairness, it should be pointed out that other localities, like Walla Walla, Wash., also produce a sweet onion. Tests have shown that the sugar content in the Vidalia is highest; it seems to have something to do with the mild climate and the paucity of sulfur in the sandy soil here.)

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 as a nut.

It is an area whose inhabitants speak lyrically. Dick Walden, for example, momentarily dropping the subject of onions, will allow he is fond of fishing "those flatwoods rivers with the tea-colored water--not the big, muddy, silted ones coming down from the high country, taking a little more of Georgia to the sea every day."

And it is the kind of town where entrepreneurial skills appear to possess no symmetry, no balance. Commerce seems based forthrightly on 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, and I wasn't making no face. He bought it for stores in Georgia and South Carolina. That fixed me up."

The 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. The grower's name, address and telephone number appear on the tag. To accept a bag of onions without all this pedigreed labeling, according to Grower Jack Todd, is to risk buying something less than a Vidalia. Todd says he can tell the difference between the taste of a Vidalia onion and one grown a mere 50 miles away.

The 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.

"It's dog eat dog in the onion business," says Walden. The people he speaks for have the growing season behind them now, but their fight for the onion's purity and integrity continues. In Virginia, a distributor who trucks them there says that as the onion's reputation has grown, so has a backlash against them, adding consumer insult to counterfeiter injury. "Wimp onions!" snarls the distributor. "They call them wimp onions!"

Perhaps the charge is just. After all, folks in Vidalia say the onion is so mild that it can be made into a pie. (Others might call it a quiche.) Here it is:

Vidalia Onion Pie

1 cup saltine cracker crumbs

5 tbs. melted butter

2 1/2 cups thinly sliced Vidalias

2 tbs. oil

2 eggs

3/4 cup milk

Salt and pepper to taste

1/4 cup grated Cheddar cheese

Combine crumbs and butter and press into an 8-in. pan. Bake eight minutes at 350DEG. Saute onions in oil until tender and put into shell. Mix remaining ingredients except cheese and pour over onions. Top with cheese and bake at 350DEG for 45 minutes.

--By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.