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When Moses led the Jews into the desert, one of the complaints he had to handle was the lack of onions and garlic. The exiles also mentioned missing fish, cucumbers, and melons, but I have nothing in my files from the Cucumber Growers Association or the Melon Council, so once again it's onions and garlic in the starring roles.

In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus noted that there was a sign on the Great Pyramid at Giza promoting the vast sums spent on feeding the workers who built it: 1600 silver talents were blown on onions, garlic and radishes to keep the people piling rock on rock. (Take note, root-crop growers: Why not use this as a basis for your "Got Radishes?" campaign?)

The long history of onions and garlic is not only culinary but medical. In around 1500 BCE an Egyptian medical work, the Ebers Codex, prescribed garlic for tumors, worms, arthritis and heart disorders as well as providing tasty recipes.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia (356-323 BCE) is said to have fed vast amounts of onions to his soldiers on the theory that they restored courage. (If it were up to me, I would prefer to lay off the onions, no matter how tasty, and stay home in Macedonia rather than rampaging through Asia Minor with Alex.)

Onions and garlic have many uses in folk medicine, including the power to ward off the evil eye. (You might think this means vampires, but couldn't it apply equally well to recruiters from the Macedonian army?) They have been used as anticoagulants, vermifuges, antiseptics, poultices and hair restorers. (You know that last one is wishful thinking or we'd all be trying to get in on the IPO of the Onion Club for Men.) They're prescribed by herbalists for everything from colds to cancer.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant esteemed onions highly, for reasons I haven't been able to pin down. During the Civil War he sent a message to the War Department, snarling, "I will not move my army without onions." They sent him three wagonloads. It may have been to ward off dysentery, or it may have been an antiseptic to treat wounds. Or maybe Grant subscribed to the Macedonian theory that onions give courage.

Other miscellaneous garlic prescriptions from purveyors of herbal remedies include the appalling news that "A Garlic and Catnip enema is a popular remedy" for back pain. So prissy humans draw back in horror and cats follow you down the street, purring lasciviously? It's never going to be "popular" with my clique.

A persistent tradition about garlic and onions had been that they kill parasites. Indeed, it has always been my custom to celebrate its powers by screaming, "Die parasites!" whenever I taste some particularly garlicky delicacy.

There seems to be a grain of truth in this. The sulfur compounds that make garlic and onions so refreshingly fragrant probably evolved to repel insect pests. On the other hand, say what you will about the human race, we're not insect pests. Almost every herb or spice we like to eat evolved to disgust insect pests. But where an aphid or weevil might stagger away gagging and frantically wiping its mouth parts, humans grin and ask for more. May I have some more pepper? More cinnamon? Gimme another jalapeņo. More garlic, please.

Garlic and onions also have anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-protozoal activity in the test tube and perhaps even in the body. But before you back up the garlic truck to the pharmacy, consider that one study of garlic's powers concluded that it had 1 percent of the strength of penicillin against certain bacteria. Apparently a lot of bacteria already know how to deal with garlic.

The pest-repellent qualities of onions and garlic have traditionally been employed in vegetable gardens, where they are planted not only for their own sweet sakes, but as bodyguards for fragile and tasty celebrity plants. One is advised to grow garlic around lettuce to repel aphids, for example.

But some insect pests have fine, cultured palates and are as likely to gnaw on garlic as lettuce. As Marian Coonse, author of "Onions, Leeks and Garlic: A Handbook for Gardeners," writes, "with the fine reputation the onion family has for protecting other plants against insect invasion, you would think they'd be immune to any such problems of their own. Not so."

Coonse is chillingly specific. She writes of the thrips, the onion maggot (which is the onion fly in its youth), the cutworm, the wireworm and the woolly worm. She mentions the spider mite, the leaf miner and the bulb mite. She harps on root knot nematodes and stem and bulb nematodes.

If you bring up fungus, she is right back at you with downy mildew, white rot and purple blotch. Open your mouth and she will hit you with pink root, neck rot and basal rot. Close it again -- it's no use -- she's on to the smuts: onion smut, black mold and smudge.

As for bacterial woes, don't get her started on soft rot, sour skin, yellow dwarf and aster yellows -- which last are carried by the six-spotted leafhopper.

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