Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Artisan Onions

From the incredibly ballsy folk at Tanimura & Antle, whose previous claim to fame was Artisan Diet Lettuce, we now have artisan red onions. Oh, I'm sorry, Artisan Sweet Italian Red Onions. From California. And a few other states. And also Peru.

These jerks are going to add a new "artisan" vegetable every few months. I can just sense it.

From their website, "Each Artisan Red Onion is hand harvested, meaning we are able to offer an onion that looks fantastic and is of consistent quality."

Because I am guessing you may not be a farmer, allow me to clue you in on something. Almost all onions are hand harvested. Usually by undocumented immigrants who are paid insanely low wages. But this is not a food politics blog, so let's just leave it at the fact that mechanical harvesting is not exactly dominant in the onion world.

I can only guess that this new marketing ploy of calling their vegetables "artisan" is working, because just two months ago, their only artisan veg was lettuce. Yes, I predict a full, lengthy menu of artisan vegetables is on the way. And, personally, I cannot wait for the day when one of their hand harvesters takes an artisan shit in one of the many, many artisan fields and they have an artisan e. coli related recall.

3 comments:

  1. I cam across your wonderful blog and enjoyed reading it. It would be very interesting if you wrote about some REAL Artisanal products. I could suggest a few if you are interested.

    It would give people a vision of all the different ways and things that 'artisanal' means

    Keep up the good work

    Peter

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  2. With all due respect I think you need to check your facts; the vast majority of onions in the developed world are mechanically harvested!

    ReplyDelete