Onion Futures
Market Outlook: Forecast Calls for Onions
Written By: Laura DeFeo
This week's harvest includes several of our favorite bunching onions, including sweet cippolinis and Italian torpedoes. Unlike the larger storage onions that many of us keep on hand year-round, these smaller onions are harvested young, rather than being cured for long-term storage. Their naturally higher sugar content and milder flavor make them especially well suited for roasting whole, caramelizing, or simply grilling until tender.
While we hope everyone is excited about having these unique onions in our futures, not everyone is an onion enthusiast. In fact, there's an entire Reddit community called r/onionhate, where people who dislike onions gather to commiserate over their ubiquity in modern cuisine.
But for many of us, it's hard to imagine a kitchen without them. Onions have been cultivated for more than 5,000 years and remain one of the world's most widely used vegetables. They form the flavor foundation of countless soups, sauces, curries, stir-fries, casseroles, salads, side-dishes, and stews. They show up sliced, diced, minced, pickled, grilled, caramelized, sauteed, breaded, deep-fried, roasted, and even simmered into jam. These alliums seem to have found their way into just about every corner of the culinary world, much to the delight of onion lovers and to the chagrin of the members of r/onionhate (fair enough).
And if you really, really love onions, you might find yourself wondering...
What if I bought all the onions?
No... really.
What if I bought every onion in existence?
And while I'm at it... why stop there? What if I bought all the onions that haven't even been grown yet?
As it turns out, that’s no longer an option.
In the 1950s, New York onion farmer and commodities trader Vincent Kosuga began accumulating enormous quantities of onions. Before long, he and his business partner had expanded their operation by purchasing onions from producers across the country.
But they didn’t stop there. They also bought up available onion futures contracts, thereby holding the rights to buy onions that had yet to be harvested.
By 1955, Kosuga and team had effectively cornered the onion market, giving them extraordinary influence over onion prices. After prices climbed, they switched strategies, betting that prices would fall. They then flooded the market with their massive stockpile of onions, causing prices to collapse almost overnight.
The scheme proved highly lucrative for Kosuga, but devastating for many onion farmers. Unsold onions piled up, and thousands of tons were eventually dumped (including some into the Chicago River) as the market unraveled.
Needless to say, farmers and fellow traders were not amused.
Their lobbying efforts ultimately persuaded Congress to pass the Onion Futures Act of 1958, making onions the only major agricultural commodity for which futures trading remains prohibited in the United States. To learn more, check out: The Great Onion Corner and the Futures Market (NPR).
So, while we're delighted to offer a variety of onions this week and throughout the season, we'd like to reassure everyone that our own onion-related ambitions remain considerably more modest - and in full compliance with federal law. Our “onion futures” consist of growing them, harvesting them, sharing them with you... and roasting, slicing, and dicing a few ourselves.
