Nor is it the only anodyne allium making headlines. In the US, researchers at Bayer Crop Science (now owned by BASF) spent 30 years Frankensteining various low-pungency onions to create the “Sunion”, which has been on sale at Waitrose in the UK for the past few winters. Here is an onion so sweet and mild (in the words of one early media report, “almost flavourless”) that it can’t make you cry. Although the onions took different paths into existence — crossbreeding for the Sunion, bombardment with heavy-ion beams for the Smile Ball — the destination was the same: both have been described as tasting a bit like an apple.