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...