Peeling Back the Layers: Vidalia Onions and the Making of a Global Agribusiness

In Depression-era South Georgia, truck farmers experimenting with onion planting found that their crop emerged unusually sweet, due to the region’s climate and particular soil content. But what gave Vidalia onions a unique flavor—their low sulfur and high water content—also rendered them nearly impossible to market, as the vegetable spoiled much quicker than regular onions. In their seventy-year quest to overcome the onion’s natural limitations, Georgia growers would transform their formerly insular region into a hub of global supermarket capitalism. As onion acreage skyrocketed with the advent of controlled atmosphere storage, growers recruited thousands of Latin American workers. Then, when storage techniques proved imperfect, industry leaders contracted with growers across Central and South America to produce sweet onions for sale during Georgia’s off-season. In striking contrast to the Vidalia onion’s branding as a “down-home” southern crop, the vegetable’s history reveals the contradictions in our modern food system.