Bread and Onions is a satirical online journal in the spirit of the satirical newspapers started by Hagop Baronian and shut down by Hagop Baronian’s opponents.
Bitter antagonism toward the truth-telling, reform-minded satirist by the influential targets of his criticism plunged him into extreme poverty and hardship. Though officially tuberculosis is noted as the reason for his untimely passing, he was actually starved to death by the Armenians of Constantinople.
It became proverbial that when he died in 1891 at the age of forty-seven, he had only two things in his pockets: a piece of old bread in one and an onion in the other. I don’t know if this is literal or like the Spanish contigo pan y cebolla (“With you, bread and onions”) it’s merely a figure of speech for penury, since bread and onions is usually the fare of the poor. Whether he actually had bread and an onion in his pockets, he had bread and an onion in his pockets.
I use Bread and Onions not as a symbol of poverty per se, but consider it the reward for a life lived in truth and guided by virtue and therefore as a mark of nobility.
–Hratch Demiurge