Tear for the Onion

The high cost of eating is something to cry about. Even the lowly onion. Last year a 50-lb. sack of Spanish or white onions cost around $6. Now, due to flooded crops and poor harvests, they run as high as $23 per sack in Chicago and $30 in Los Angeles. The result: for the first time in memory, lunch-counter customers cannot depend on free onion slices with their hamburgers.

Manhattan's Bun & Burger chain has removed sliced onions from its lunch counters, keeping instead an emergency supply of chopped onions hidden away and given only to those customers "who insist they cannot eat a hamburger without them." Customers have generally been cooperative because, as one short-order cook put it, "they are not buying onions for their homes either." At Manhattan's Soup Burg, they claim that the cost of raw onion per hamburger is up to 70 or 80. "It's getting to be the most expensive part of the hamburger," says one of the waiters. The National Press Club in Washington has eliminated the thick onion garnish from the top of its $2 hamburger. Says the club chef, "You have to know somebody these days to get an onion."

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