Now I'll tell you about onion powder ... [Orig. 03-14-10]

RE:
"Around 1470, the Turks began disrupting the overland trade routes east
from the Mediterranean. In Western Europe, there were pepper shortages
and the price of pepper skyrocketed. So European explorers sailed West
and South in search of an alternate trade route. Historian Henry Hobson
stated: "The Americas were discovered as a by-product in the search for
pepper." "


The space race began over onion powder.
Mid-century, last century, there was a series of onion-crop failures around the world.
French's had just perfected freeze-dried onion soup mix, and had managed to create a world-wide ravenous hunger for this product, often consumed in off-label methods. This, atop the usual onion-lust of 20th century people, who considered the onion an aphrodisiac, as well as a spice, flavorant, and foodstuff.
The onion blight had sent nations on the run, looking for those bulbs of sweet potency. It was far worse than the Dutch tulip bulb bubble of 1637. Thing was, 20th century peoples were crafty -- no, innovative, no, they liked to think of themselves as agents of PROGRESS, and in truth, they reached the height of PROGRESS, 20th century people WON THE GAME of PROGRESS, but, as you see, there's never really only one game going.
It was rumored that the moon was made of onion powder, placed there by Marco Polo during his forays of discovery between the Orient and the Venetian Republic, over the turn of the 14th c.
The nations of the 20th century vied to cash in on that orbiting cache of the "spice of life," sent into orbit by means of a trebuchet, well on its way to perfection since the time of Archimedes ... sorry, I know you know some of these things, but I cannot suppose you know all, this is why I bore you with these things you know so well.
So, you know, throwing a thing up in the air is not nearly so fraught with peril as having a thing come down; thus a great deal of time passes between the perfection of the trebuchet and that of the rocket. By the mid 20th c., it came down to the Russians and the Americans, and the Russians were the first to manage rocket orbit, as I know you know, still not besting the accomplishments of Marco Polo.
With Sputnik orbiting, the Americans committed to make it to the moon first, and this was done in 1969! The astronauts scooped up a couple of shoeboxes of the moon powder, but they could tell already, they could feel, even with the sensory deprivation of bulky spacesuits and breathing apparati, that it was not onion powder.
Still, they had gone to the moon, and that was something.
In the spring of 1970, the onions came back full-force. No blight, no fungus, no mysterious sliming or withering. People simply didn't mention it after that, but I'm telling you now.