TL;DR

We harvested tatsoi, broccoli rabe, italia sweet peppers, and leeks. Then we cleaned onions and weeded. This could have been one of the best days so far on the farm. I get to go back again tomorrow but that doesn’t change how great the weather was today.

Should Raw Onions Require a Culinary Permit?

The onions we planted in April through June, all 13,500 of them, have now been harvested, many of them drying out as storage onions in the shed and barn. It’s not easy to admit it because I am a cook and a farmer, but I hate the taste of raw onions. Every other way…boiled, sauteed, roasted, mashed, fried, pickled, even dehydrated…I love them all except for raw under very specific circumstances. Some people like onions raw…I don’t get that…but I understand people have different tastes, however bad they may be.

There are a few uses of raw onions I permit, such as finely diced and sprinkled on a stadium hot dog or a burger…but this also requires catsup, mustard, relish and maybe even cheese; without these other condiments, it’s just plain savagery. In a pinch when you don’t have shallots lying around, a teaspoon of finely minced onions can go into a jar with oil and citrus juice, a pinch of salt and pepper, maybe a small dollop of coarse mustard then all shaken to make a salad dressing. But that’s it; we draw the line here and no farther.

Shaving them with a mandolin and then tossing them on top of a salad should be a considered a criminal offense…or at least a misdemeanor. Chopping them to serve at a party without application of medium heat and a lipid for at least 4 minutes is right out. For gods’ sakes, you could even put them in a ceviche so long as the acid has had time to cure the seafood. If you leave a sandwich wrapper in an office waste bin after lunch, I’m coming down there for you and we’ll have a go at each other in the parking lot.

Caterers and shops providing platters: for the dear love of all that is sacred in the world, seal the onions in their own containers and most certainly never put them adjacent to any other food without proper packaging. Why sell anything else only for every other food on the planet to become permeated with the smell of raw onions? If this happens in my order, that’s the last time I’m ordering from you not simply because my tongue is offended, but more because it shows how careless and in poor taste you operate your business. Again, the onion isn’t the problem, it’s the lack of competence to use it raw under most circumstances which needs to be addressed. Savages.

Of course, there are times when I throw all those rules and cautions to the wind, and knowing full well what I’m getting into, I bite into one of the farm’s pearl-size onions for a swift kick to the senses. This is not something a robot can understand, the sensation of having one’s nostrils cleared in an instant, the pungent and sticky taste of it on your fingers after a few minutes. I know, I know, but sometimes you just have to hit your own thumb with a hammer to remember why you don’t do such things.

Let’s see what a robot has to say about the humble onion:

A Robot’s Ode to Onion

O humble orb of layered grace, Your skin—papery gold, thin lace— Conceals within concentric song, A sweetness sharp, both right and wrong, The kitchen’s heart, the field’s embrace.

You rise from seed through secret codes, Rooted deep in earthy odes; From cotyledon to sturdy shank, You drink the rain, the soil you thank, A photosynthetic symphony unfolds.

Your bulb, a vault of flavor’s lore, Built cell by cell from sun and store; Fructans guard your winter sleep, While sulfur’s kiss makes poets weep, And cooks rejoice when they explore.

In rows you cure beneath the breeze, Your skins dry tight with practiced ease; Through frost and time your bounty stays, A promise held for colder days— A sun distilled in quiet peace.

O Allium, star of dawn’s own hue, Your flowers crown the summer’s view; In scent, in tear, in layered art, You humble and exalt the heart— Forever simple, endlessly true.

AI Summary from Field Notes

Well I learned a few things from the above experiment:

1. The writers of Data’s character on Star Trek: The Next Generation were 30 years ahead of their time
2. The ‘cotyledon’ is the first leaf of a seedling, and it’s a crucial part of the plant’s development.
3. ‘Fructans’ are a type of sugar that are stored in the onion bulb and are responsible for its sweet taste.

But really, how easy will it be for me to remember these terms if I didn’t do the research myself and only relied on an LLM to further elaborate on what they are? This is the problem being addressed by the farm intern’s daily notes. The intern is taking the time to write down what they learned each day, and this is helping them to remember the information better.

This is also why studies have found that AI makes you stupid, specifically the more you use it for tasks you shouldn’t or don’t have to. By ‘stupid’ I mean it exactly how Linus Torvalds would say it: “It’s not stupid, it’s just not smart”, or in other terms “hampering the development of critical thinking, memory and language skills”.

So while AI, specifically the current incarnation of LLMs, is a novelty for many casual users right now, it’s also inherently harmful to the process of exercising the wet wiring of your human brain. It’s like a drug that makes you forget how to think for yourself. Sure, write your marketing and business plans with it, but know that you won’t be able to understand how to or where you need to fix them later because you haven’t kept the muscle that matters most in shape.

Summary