I was having a discussion about economics with Stanza over at CookingOnSundays, who mentioned the Big Mac Index, which is a method of measuring the purchasing power parity of various currencies by comparing the price of a Big Mac in each country. This got me thinking (of course) about the global infiltration of onions (contained within the Big Mac).
It occurs to me that no matter the nationality, if you go look through all the cook books in a book store, unless you are looking at desserts, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-95% of the recipes contain some form of onion. Unlike the Big Mac, the onion has no branding or sacred cow liabilities, no foreign connotations, and as unbelievable as it may seem, has managed to infiltrate more places than McDonalds and Starbucks combined.
Onions like to keep a low profile. They don't like to be mentioned on labels. As much as my eyes water just thinking about it, perhaps if we could get them more recognition as the perfect purchasing power parity predictor, we could get them noticed for the overused sub-par filler they are.
Update: Due to the attention this post has getting, I did a bit more looking into it ...
