At Work in a Vale of Tears

Abstract

You know what it is like to be in the crying zone when you cut a raw onion in the kitchen. Now imagine cutting 70 tons of onions – a typical day’s work at a local snack food manufacturing plant, where truckloads of raw onions are turned into frozen, deep-fried onion rings. That’s a lot of onions, and a lot of tears. At the plant, they say you get used to cutting onions and stop crying after a few minutes.

“Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time; and sometimes you weep.”

Carl Sandburg, American poet