An onion sweetener: Is this a bright bulb idea?

A novel onion waste-based sweetener is an incubated-startup idea picked by the Centre for national scaling up. In a country of carb-heavy diets, could it ease our diabetes burden?

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The onion is a powerful vegetable, aside from being an esteemed essential in the kitchen, vested with the power to make the toughest of us cry. This is a defence mechanism against predators. Slice in, and it releases an irritant that makes our lachrymal glands wet our eyes. This is an elementary learning, common enough to explain why the familiar bulb crept into spoken English as a subject of knowledge: To ‘know one’s onions’ means to possess a basic mastery over something. But the onion may have got a starring role in this idiom for its complexity. Indeed, the veggie also gets deployed as an analogy in other exalted contexts that are even more abstract (and, with luck, also evolved). In the field of marketing, for example, where psychographic profiles matter as much as any demographic dividend, it has long been handy as a click-on-screen graphic. By one origin story, it was a Unilever marketing chief called Jerry Fisher who first said, "Consumer behaviour is like an onion. It has layers that need to be peeled back one at a time." Its real power in India, though