When did ‘Green Onions’ ever become nasty?
I’ve been researching the highly recognizable 1962 instrumental song called “Green Onions,” featured on the “American Graffiti” movie soundtrack, and the band who released it.
The song was recorded by Booker T. & the MG’s, the house band for the Memphis soul music label Stax Records, where other musical greats Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Isaac Hayes also recorded music. (I have a family tie-in, too: My uncle Arthur “A” Avant was a session guitar player who recorded with Hayes.)
But back to that curious song name, “Green Onions.” Where did that come from?
The band developed the song while waiting on another singer to show up for a session. They weren’t convinced it was good once they played back the recording, but if they decided they liked it enough to add it to the B side, what would they even call it, they wondered. Booker T. Jones replied: “'Green Onions,’ because that is the nastiest thing I can think of, and it’s something you throw away.”
Those nasty experiences
That one statement immediately had me thinking about nasty experiences in the produce department, where it’s not all rosebuds and perfume. Smells of years past can still make us grimace when we think about them.
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Also, Booker T.’s “it’s something you throw away” statement had me reflecting on poor experiences with products we could never sell or did not know how to sell. In some cases, we didn’t even know what it was, other than the name of it. That was a symptom of the mid-1980s and 1990s, when a proliferation of so many new fresh produce items came to market, before the value-added category was the behemoth it is today.
I distinctly remember the first time I brought in passion fruit, offered by our specialty supplier. I was a risk-taker type of produce manager, so I wanted to try it for my customers.
The passion fruit arrived beautiful and purple with a smooth exterior. We slapped a PLU sticker on them (our own assigned PLU) and a sign with the price. And then we set the passion fruit into the cold, single-deck produce case with all the other specialty items — never realizing passion fruit needed to be merchandised at ambient temperature, generally known as room temperature.
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After a week or so, I don’t think we sold a single one, and the fruit started to shrivel. Guess what we did? Yep, we threw out the passion fruit. And when the skin starts to wrinkle, that’s exactly when they were perfect to eat. Oh, we popped one open, and as soon as we saw the fruit inside, no one was willing to give it a try. It was a nasty experience.
Surprise and delight
How many nasty experiences do produce managers have because they just don’t know what they are working with or how to handle or merchandise it? If they don’t know how the product even tastes, they can’t very well suggestive-sell to consumers.
But surely with Google, Instagram and TikTok for self-education, it’s much more likely to have some level of product knowledge than it was for us all those years ago.
The produce department is a place to surprise and delight. Nasty has no place in #freshproduce. The word should be stricken from the vernacular of the fresh produce world. But that can only happen with knowledge of the product and understanding how to handle and sell it.
Food waste is a real thing. Produce departments cannot afford to allow a lack of product knowledge and poor understanding of the products they handle to be a culprit in more product loss and food waste.
As for what Booker T. said about “Green Onions,” it does not have to be true of anything we sell in the produce department.
This column is part of a series by Joe Watson, who spent 30-plus years as the director of produce for Rouses Markets and was named Produce Retailer of the Year and honored as one of The Packer 25, both in 2014. Watson now serves as a vice president of retail, foodservice and wholesale for International Fresh Produce Association.
