Coralville, Iowa-based Philip Kwilose is the general manager at Five Star Home Improvement. He has boosted sales revenue there for over six years, his current position in a sales career that has spanned almost two decades. In his leisure, Philip Kwilose enjoys fishing, traveling, and cooking.
Cooking often requires an onion as an essential recipe ingredient, due to its minerals, vitamins, and plant compounds that promote health. An onion is a vegetable with many inner layers and a thin, dry skin. It has a round shape and a well-known powerful smell and taste.
When an onion is cut, it releases a chemical irritant that triggers the tear glands. It gets its distinctive flavor from sulfur, the chemical behind the stinky smell of rotten eggs. Onions contain the synthase enzyme, which reacts with sulfur to create syn-propanediol S-oxide, the chemical compound that causes tears. The reaction is not the same in everyone, because some people have lachrymal glands that are more sensitive than others’.
To stop the tears when chopping, store the onion in the fridge. A cold onion doesn’t release the chemical irritant as quickly as a warm one. The compound is only an irritant and doesn’t pose any danger to the eye.
Phillip Kwilose 