Onion World America

This is one of the most incredible places I have ever seen, in all my travels, and I am not even sure how I found it.

We were traveling to Fresno from our home in the high Mojave desert, for my wife to take more of her teaching credential classes, but the road well traveled there is a bit insane, with people flying well above posted limits, along with laden semi trailers and decrepit farm lories going well below that limit. It is a four lane road, but a long time overdue for maintenance. So we took some two lane road with a lower speed limit, but almost completely without traffic. -nice.

And there it was, Onion World America. There were little road signs in red, light green and white, the color of the Mexican flag, with words in dark green, leading the way to it, but we weren’t prepared to find a building almost twenty acres wide.

Actually the inside is open, so the ‘building’ is really a high white wooden wall, with the entrance looking like a mall entrance, with eight all glass doors. The parking lot was not paved, or graveled, but just dirt, and the lot was nearly full of cars and pickup trucks.

Inside, Mariachi music played over speakers, and we found ourselves in what must be the largest farmers market in the world. I could smell tacos cooking in the air, mixed with all the other fragrant smells of sweet onions, tomatoes, corn, oregano and basil.

The place was well ordered in its layout, with wide concrete aisles and tidy waist-level wooden tables, all painted dark green, and loaded down with produce and fruit of every description.

But how odd, to our unaccustomed sensibilities that everyone there were Mexican-Americans. We seemed to be the only ‘white’ people around. It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in Tijuana. My wife and I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all, but it seemed strange, here in the California heartland, of the Napa Valley. But on reflection, I guess it made sense, because most of the people living there were migrant workers, harvesting everything that grows in the lush wide valley.

I felt a swelling of pride for these people, seeing what they had accomplished here, in their adopted homeland. Onion World America was a fine place.

As we walked through the nearly twenty acres, we found amazing things. Who knew that there could be so many varieties of fruit and vegetables? There was even a food court, and a butcher market, as well as plants and flowers for sale, and dried herbs of every description – fantastic!

In the food court we found the source of the piped music; a full Mariachi band, in their colorful regalia, with their shiny trumpets, mellow guitars and violins. It was astonishing to watch and listen to them as we ate our overstuffed tacos and drank our Tamarindo sodas.

Later, we happened upon a sort of school, with children, well dressed and exceptionally behaved, getting lessons in Spanish and English from a severe young woman. My wife the teacher took note of all of this, for no California school would ever be conducted outside of a guard-gated and fortressed school campus. What we were seeing must have been the equivalent to some home school setting, and California has many of those – perhaps a fifth of all children in our state are home schooled, or schooled in learning centers staffed by parents or uncredentialed teachers.

But my attention was on a small boy, talking to his parent or relative, outside of the ‘school’ area. He was asking where the door was.

“Pablo, how do you go down? Where is the door?”

“Be quiet, Jose, we are not permitted down there.”

“But Sister works down there, and she says it is very bright with the lights, and the onions there are special. I want to see it.”

“We will talk about it later. Now go to class.”

The boy went without further comment. You know, I have been in my wife’s school, and the kids there are loud, disruptive and many of them are autistic. Classroom behavior is almost always chaotic, and learning seldom takes place, despite excellent curriculums and well trained, dedicated teachers. It is like our children are all drugged, or something, because their public school test scores are the lowest in the country. I am very hopeful that the kids who are schooled elsewhere are better students.

Yeah, people will say that if we are overweight, depressed or our kids are autistic, we should take a pill, or do some exercise, but the truth is that nobody in America eats food anymore. Not the food our Grandma would recognize. That generation all ate natural foods from their farms, but everything we eat is machine processed and unnatural – but enough of all that.

The single thing we discovered at OWA was a small green onion, with an odd pale green head. Most all green onions have a white head and are mild. This one was something new, and the man at the table was saying that it could cure many diseases, from colds to cancer.

I was taken aback by this, having had my own bouts with cancer. And I knew a lot about all sorts of ‘cures.’

You see, in America, there is one kind of medicine permitted, and it involves two things – surgery and drugs. Everything else is proscribed – illegal. The rest of the world follows a different paradigm concerning medicine – the body is trained by the mind to heal itself, and the medicines are homeopathic – that is, natural plants and herbs. China, Japan, Asia and India all follow this form of medicine in their own fashion, with similar success to our own. (Of course, no one is allowed to say that their form of medicine does not have side effects and is far less violent and toxic to humans than our kind of medicine.)

In this country, no one is also allowed to say that some plant or herb can cure anything, in spite of the fact that they can and do cure things. So this fellow, talking about a strange onion that can prevent and cure a great many things, set off alarms in my head.

I listened to him, and what he was saying was wonderful. The green onion, found in South America, was the main product of this whole place. It was expensive, and it should not be refrigerated, but kept in the open air, and always eaten raw – never cooked. It has a shelf-life of a month, and can be eaten, even if it begins to sprout.

He gave us both a sample, a full slice, on a thin cracker. It didn’t exactly taste like an onion at all, but had sort of an earthy flavor, very mild and a bit sweet.

The price was $10 a pound, and I thought as I bought two pounds of it, that this was a major rip-off. But hey, being Gringos, and hopeful of something that cures bad diseases, what would you expect of us?

So far, the onions have lasted six weeks, and we are at the last of it. And yes, we have had no colds, which is great for my wife the teacher, seeing that half of her kids are out sick with flu and Impetigo, and I am still off of chemo, but of course I expect to be off of it from now on.

But I went back to find OWA, just for some more of those odd green onions, and some more of that Mariachi music and tacos, but I have not been able to find the place again.

Googleing the place doesn’t help. I get an Onion World in Walla Walla Washington, and and Onion World magazine, and an Onion World in China, but nothing along the road to Fresno. How odd. How can anyone lose a twenty-acre building. That whole valley is more than a hundred miles wide. Along the main road, it is a hundred miles West to the coast, and a hundred miles East to the Sierra mountains. Sacramento lies to the North and Bakersfield is to the South, and where we were at Onion World America, was in the middle of all that, someplace North of Valencia and South of Fresno, a few miles off the beaten path.

I have also tried to research that nameless odd green onion, but again, no luck. It is like the whole thing is another one of my Urban Legends.

Anyone have directions?

Let me know.

Regards,
Roger Born
“Sorry. No Refunds”

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