Mark Labat, of Slidell, La., tours the Vidalia Onion Museum in Vidalia, Ga. The $250,000 museum opened in April. The museum chronicles the Vidalia onion’s Depression-era origins to its rise as a gourmet crop worth $150 million annually.
(AP Photo/Russ Bynum)IF YOU GOWhat: VIDALIA ONION MUSEUMWhere: 100 Vidalia Sweet Onion Drive, Vidalia, Ga.When: Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.Website: http://www.vidaliaonion.org;Phone: 912-538-8687.Tickets: No admission fee.
VIDALIA, Ga. – They’ve started fistfights and court battles, been romanticized in country songs and counterfeited by bootleggers. Their trademark sweetness has made them a coveted ingredient in recipes from salads and relishes to cookies and muffins.
If a museum dedicated to onions sounds rooted in folly, the history behind the famous Vidalia onion can likely hold its own with other veggie shrines such as the Idaho Potato Museum, the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Museum in Minnesota and the tiny Carrot Museum tucked in a Rhode Island bed-and-breakfast.
The freshly opened Vidalia Onion Museum digs fairly deep to dish the good, the bad and the yummy on Georgia’s official state vegetable – including the unearthed origin of Vidalias’ reputation for being so sweet they can be eaten like apples.
“You go anywhere in the country and you get these crazy, random museums. So naturally people expected we had an onion museum,” said Wendy Brannen, who oversaw creation of the museum in her job as executive director of the Vidalia Onion Committee, which handles marketing of the crop.