So Hot Right Now: Why We Love the Chile Pepper

Perhaps no other plant is as entwined with pain and pleasure as the chile pepper. But why does it burn—and why on earth do we crave that uncomfortable sensation? How did capsaicin's fungus-fighting, digestion-enhancing, and adrenaline-triggering powers convince early hunter gatherers in South America to fall in love with the chile's tiny berry ancestors, and then European colonists to spread chiles around the world? Plus, new insights into the rise of the “superhots,” chilehead competitions, and a murder-by-Carolina-Reaper attempt right here on team Gastropod. Who survived to tell the tale? Listen in to find out! (encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Nicola Twilley?

  It's incredible.

• 0:02Cynthia Graber?

  Oh. This is you on Carolina Reaper pepper, huh?

• 0:06Nicola Twilley?

  I know. It just keeps.

• 0:10Cynthia Graber?

  It keeps giving and giving.

• 0:13Nicola Twilley?

  It's just like, oh, no. Anyway, I was just like, can you imagine if I rolled my eyes? I'd be in the emergency room. Oh, dear. Anyway, kids, don't try Carolina Reaper at home.

• 0:29Cynthia Graber?

  Do not. Do not even open the jar.

• 0:31Nicola Twilley?

  Yeah. Do not even have a friend ship you the jar.

• 0:37Cynthia Graber?

  I promise, I was not trying to unleash a chemical bomb on Nikki and her husband Jeff. The lid to the jar of Carolina Reaper chili powder apparently came off in the mail. She was copying throughout our entire next recording session.

• 0:49Nicola Twilley?

  I'm this close to reporting you to HR, Cynthia, except that we don't actually have HR at our two-woman show. But really, however mad I sometimes make you, that was not acceptable behavior in the workplace.

• 1:02Cynthia Graber?

  I do still feel bad about it. I mean, the guy who sold me all the chilies we bought for this episode, including the Carolina Reaper, he told me we have to be so very careful with it. He was in pain for 20 minutes just from pouring it into jars for sale from inhaling the dust.

• 1:16Nicola Twilley?

  I do literally know how he feels, sadly.

• 1:19Cynthia Graber?

  Yes, this episode, we are deliberately subjecting ourselves to the chili pepper burn.

• 1:24Nicola Twilley?

  And not just any chili pepper burn, but the hottest chili pepper in the world.

• 1:29Cynthia Graber?

  That's what we do for you, dear listeners. We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 1:35Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley. And normally, I really like chili peppers. I have lots of different dried ones in my spice cabinet and all kinds of fun fermented hot sauces, chili crisps, salsa matcha in my fridge. So I was looking forward to this episode.

• 1:50Cynthia Graber?

  Unsurprisingly, I have pretty much the same setup in my kitchen as Nikki does. I have hot sauce on the table for nearly every meal, including breakfast. But I started to get a little nervous hearing her cough, which made me wonder, why do we humans love something that sometimes feels like it's trying to kill us?

• 2:06Nicola Twilley?

  The chili is botanically a berry, for heaven's sake. Why is it so hot and spicy rather than just sweet and fruity?

• 2:13Cynthia Graber?

  How did this rather assertive berry spread from its home in South America and conquer, well, almost the entire world?

• 2:19Nicola Twilley?

  To the point where I can't even imagine Indian or Chinese or Nigerian food without it.

• 2:24Cynthia Graber?

  And why was the US and Northern Europe so slow to catch on?

• 2:27Nicola Twilley?

  All that, plus the rise of the super hot. Is there a limit, or will chilies finally actually kill us?

• 2:33Cynthia Graber?

  This encore episode was made possible thanks to generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, as well as the Burroughs Welcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye? What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 3:28Speaker 03

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• 4:01Cynthia Graber?

  This might sound like a just-so story, but why is the chili pepper hot?

• 4:06Nicola Twilley?

  To answer that, we spoke to Marisol Priscilla. She's a chef and a culinary historian, and she wrote an incredibly beautiful book called Peppers of the Americas, which traces chili peppers all the way back to their South American origins.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  So the forebears of today's peppers and tomatoes split off from a common ancestor about 20 million years ago in South America.

• 4:27Cynthia Graber?

  Marisol says back then, millions of years ago, peppers looked and smelled like a tasty snack to the animals in the region.

• 4:33Nicola Twilley?

  Which was a problem because the chili pepper's precious seeds would get destroyed in most animal guts, and chili peppers want to have baby chili peppers.

• 4:41Cynthia Graber?

  And so chilies developed a defense strategy.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  A devilish, you know, non-poisonous thing in the form of capsaicin, which is an alkaloid, that is painful to most animals. They spot, and they avoided them, but birds didn't.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Birds have this amazing ability to not feel the heat sensation because they don't have the same heat receptors in their mouths or their skin the way we do.

• 5:05Nicola Twilley?

  Joining the chili chorus is Denise Kuhn. She's a chili pepper researcher at New Mexico State University, home to the one and only Chili Pepper Institute.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  And so they can eat lots and lots of these tiny, hot little berries and pass it through their digestive system unarmed and grows into a new plant. Whereas us mammals, we can feel the heat and it passes through our digestive system and actually our system destroys the seeds so it can't grow into a new plant. And that's kind of why we think that the chili pepper plant evolved capsaicin was to keep mammals from eating them, but then look at what we go and do.

• 5:43Cynthia Graber?

  Denise told us chili peppers are the only plants in the world that produce capsaicin. And because chilies are making capsaicin to protect their precious seeds, they put most of that protection right around those seeds.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  And if you cut a pepper open, even if it's a bell pepper with no capsaicin at all, you notice that the seeds on the inside are attached to a white tissue, which the botanists call placenta, because it supports the developing embryo as it develops. And it turns out that most of the capsaicin in chili plants is found in that supporting material, in the placenta.

• 6:23Nicola Twilley?

  Listen up, this is Harold McGee, star of our recent Smoke episode, author of Nose Dive and On Food and Cooking, and all-round food science whizkid. And he is correcting a common misperception. A lot of people think that most of the heat in a chili pepper is in the seeds, but he says, no, it's mostly in the white placenta stuff.

• 6:43Speaker 06

  The thing that happens, though, is that if there is a lot in the placentas, during the drying process, as the fruit shrinks, it's easier for the capsaicin in the placenta to spread around the interior of the fruit. And so it's much more difficult to kind of pick out the placenta and minimize the heat once the chilies have been dried.

• 7:10Cynthia Graber?

  So this is why and where chilies are spicy. But if the point was to put us off from eating them, then why did early humans in what's now Peru and Bolivia give them a try?

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Prehistoric hunter-gatherers must have been curious about these beautiful scarlet pots, and they experimented with the specimens that they found close to their own settlements.

• 7:29Nicola Twilley?

  Some of these wild peppers would have been more spicy and some less. Different plants and even different fruits on the same plant can have more or less capsaicin.

• 7:37Cynthia Graber?

  But there's one particular reason that ancient hunters might have preferred the spicy ones. Capsaicin naturally repels insects, but sometimes those insects might mistakenly take a bite of a pepper. But even with insect bite holes in them, the damaged berries wouldn't have gone bad. And that's because capsaicin also fights off fungus.

• 7:54Nicola Twilley?

  A fungus-free pepper will last longer, which is great for a human that wants to eat it. And the capsaicin in it might even prevent other food from going moldy. That's even better. The researchers who discovered this connection between insect bites and capsaicin levels, their theory is that humans might have deliberately sought out and added the spiciest peppers to their foods as a kind of early preservative, kind of like garlic.

• 8:18Cynthia Graber?

  And Marisol thinks there was another reason that early humans in South America were so attracted to peppers. She visited the archaeologist's site where some of the very earliest pepper seeds from food were found, and she saw villagers who lived nearby the site preparing food from corn, root vegetables, shellfish, and not much else.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  So it struck me that what elevated, you know, this type of cooking from subsistence rations. To a truth we've seen was the skilled use of peppers, so the local ahis that I had seen women crushing into sauces.

• 8:48Nicola Twilley?

  These chili peppers, they're called ahí locally. Maricel says they're doing two different things. They make the bland, starchy food more interesting, for sure, more flavorful and spicy. And the irritation of the capsaicin, that stimulates your mouth to produce more saliva. And saliva contains an enzyme that breaks down starchy foods. So chilies make starchy foods less boring to eat and easier to digest.

• 9:13Cynthia Graber?

  Honestly, the pep from the heat, in addition to all the great flavors in chilies, that spice can kind of make food more exciting. It really does literally add some zing.

• 9:21Nicola Twilley?

  I mean, how many terrible sandwiches and on the road breakfasts have you rescued with some hot sauce? All of them.

• 9:27Cynthia Graber?

  All of this explains why we might have been attracted to peppers. But it's been hard for scientists to figure out how long we've been eating spicy peppers. Mostly that's because in the hot, humid regions where many of the earliest peppers grew, the seeds and all the rest of the plant disintegrate really quickly, which made one site in Peru really exciting.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  The site is called El Brujo, the shaman, and it has been occupied continuously for as long as we have evidence of human beings in Western South America. So you find temples and subterranean dwellings, burial chambers, the remnants of successive civilizations. But to me, one of the most important sites in the complex is a huge, dark-colored mound called Huaca Prieta.

• 10:10Nicola Twilley?

  Maricel told us that Huaca Prieta was first excavated in 1946 by an archaeologist from the American Museum of Natural History.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  And they started excavating this mound. They found dwellings and kitchens. They found ancient garbage dumps and latrines in the stages of their exploration. So they were peeling layer by layer of history. But the refuse heap was actually much more exciting to them than any jewels, because organic matter is very difficult to combine.

• 10:45Cynthia Graber?

  But there was plenty of it at Huaca Prieta. So the archaeologists took samples of the fossilized poop. They had it analyzed using the new technique at the time of carbon 14 dating to get a better read on how old it was. But even more exciting, they sent that poop to a guy who founded an entire new field of research that uses ancient poop to figure out what ancient people ate.

• 11:04Nicola Twilley?

  And this guy concluded that seven and a half thousand years ago, the people who lived at this site were eating not just one, but a few different kinds of spicy peppers.

• 11:13Cynthia Graber?

  Probably then and still today, there are around 30 species of wild peppers. At some point around the time the El Brujo people were eating chilies, or since then, nobody really knows, we domesticated five species that we still enjoy today.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Now, the most important of these species is Capsicum anion, which is believed to have been domesticated in what is today Mexico. So these five species basically have their niches historically. There were places where they were domesticated first.

• 11:43Nicola Twilley?

  Maricel compares the five domesticated chili pepper species to the five alliums: garlic, chives, onions, leeks, and shallots, in terms of how different they can be in their flavor personalities.

• 11:55Cynthia Graber?

  Anem is the most common domesticated chili, and so unsurprisingly, it's the most diverse. Basically, all the dozens of peppers you might eat in Mexico are anems, jalapenos, poblanos, bell peppers, all anem.

• 12:05Nicola Twilley?

  Then there's genense, of which the most famous is probably habanero. Number three is bacatum, which you mostly find in Peru. And then there's number four, frutescens, which Maricel says is the most one-note of the chili pepper family. It's just kind of sharp and hot. The most famous frutescens is tabasco.

• 12:24Cynthia Graber?

  The fifth and final species is called pubescens, and this one we almost never eat in the US or Europe because it doesn't dry well. And so mostly people eat it fresh in South America, or it gets shipped frozen and you might find it under the name rocoto or locoto in Latin American restaurants.

• 12:38Nicola Twilley?

  All of the five have different heat profiles and different flavor notes as a species. And then there's obviously a huge amount of variety within the species, and really, we just needed to try them.

• 12:49Cynthia Graber?

  We had eight different dried chili peppers lined up in front of us. It wasn't the season for fresh. We decided to start with the tapin. It's an anem. It's a tiny little round pepper, like the size of a little wild blueberry. It's the one you can buy in the stores that's the closest to the wild chili pepper. And because it was dried, we had to rehydrate a few with boiling water.

• 13:08Cynthia Graber?

  So shall we try one?

• 13:09Nicola Twilley?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Cynthia Graber?

  Okay. Here we go.

• 13:10Nicola Twilley?

  Here we go.

• 13:13Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Why do we start with this? Oh, my God, Nikki.

• 13:18Nicola Twilley?

  Why? Why? Why? I just, I had to just swallow it. Why?

• 13:25Nicola Twilley?

  I think my digestive tract is burning. You know that? Okay, so Cynthia, I think it's good. Now I feel like really pretty good about having had the Reaper yesterday because absolutely this is nothing. This is nothing.

• 13:39Speaker 07

  Yes, it's spicy.

• 13:41Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, my God, it's spicy. It has some, it has some nice flavors to it. But it's smoky. It has some smokiness. It has some fruitiness.

• 13:54Speaker 07

  It's quite sharp.

• 13:55Cynthia Graber?

  I swallowed that really quickly. I couldn't let it spend too much time in my mouth.

• 13:59Nicola Twilley?

  I was trying to let it spend time in my mouth. And now I feel like that might have been a mistake. So obviously, we were in a fair amount of pain. And like we said, that pain is the plant trying to get us not to eat it so that a bird will eat it instead.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  The most obvious effect of capsaicin on the body is the pain. And it turns out that, you know, we called the sensation that capsaicin causes heat. And that's for a very good reason, because it turns out to activate a receptor in our body that responds to what's called noxious heat, heat that's above a temperature that our bodies should be encountering.

• 14:42Cynthia Graber?

  The capsaicin molecule is triggering a receptor in our mouths, or maybe in my esophagus, that has a lot of other work to do. It's the same receptor that would be kicked into high gear if you put some boiling hot water or tea in your mouth. It's part of something called the somatosensory system.

• 14:56Speaker 07

  It's our danger sense. If people are born with, and it's a rare condition, but if they're born without the ability to detect somatosensation, they experience many different kinds of injuries, sometimes fatal ones, because they simply have no ability to sense pain.

• 15:13Cynthia Graber?

  Pam Dalton has been on the show before. She's a scientist at the Monell Center in Philly, and she works with capsaicin in the lab. Pam told us that we can, in fact, feel capsaicin anywhere on our body, as long as our skin isn't too tough.

• 15:25Speaker 07

  But it's especially sensitive to the mucosa. And in the oral cavity, we have a lot of receptors that are sensitive, that are essentially the receptors for the capsaicin molecule. And so it's a very sensitive place to actually experience it.

• 15:43Cynthia Graber?

  No kidding. Another thing I noticed personally, after I ate that tapin, it felt like the very follicles on my head were starting to sweat. I was literally hot, which is a weird reaction because the temperature in the room hadn't changed at all.

• 15:55Speaker 06

  That's because our body thinks it's hotter than it actually is. And so it's putting into effect all these cooling mechanisms so that it can maintain our temperature appropriately. But our temperature hasn't changed, so that's the interesting thing.

• 16:12Nicola Twilley?

  It's really weird. A good dose of capsaicin triggers all the same responses in your body, as if you were literally getting a third degree burn, except the actual tissue damage of a third degree burn. You sweat, you get flushed, your blood vessels dilate, your tongue literally turns redder when you eat spicy foods, all its blood vessels dilate to try to cool things down.

• 16:35Cynthia Graber?

  This whole process is weird, yes, but it's also kind of useful in parts of the world where you might want to sweat even while you're sitting around eating.

• 16:42Speaker 07

  And this is one of the reasons, and of course, it's borne out by sort of anthropological data, but this is why hot, spicy foods containing capsaicin have been used a lot in very tropical, warm environments as a way to promote cooling of the body and reducing the body heat by this evaporative cooling that occurs.

• 17:05Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, back in non-tropical Philly, Pam actually works with neat capsaicin in the lab.

• 17:10Speaker 07

  It's white and a little crystal-y, yes. Powdery, but, but a little flaky, too, as well.

• 17:16Cynthia Graber?

  After that tapin, the powdered pure capsaicin sounds a little terrifying to me. We wondered if Pam ever tried it neat.

• 17:23Speaker 07

  Of course.

• 17:25Speaker 07

  I'm one of those scientists that likes to put things in my nose and in my mouth, you know, depending on what I'm doing. But mostly, we have used it in solutions. And once we were doing it in aerosol form, so we had an aerosol generator and we were using that, that was a little dangerous because you would walk into a room where it had been aerosolized and it was completely invisible. But it would, you know, essentially cause reflex apnea. You would take your breath away. You would almost stop breathing as a reflex, which is clearly what happens when people are getting sprayed with pepper spray.

• 18:04Nicola Twilley?

  Or, you know, unpacking a shipment of Carolina Reaper from their co-host and supposed friend.

• 18:10Cynthia Graber?

  Actually, people in South and Central America used chilies in war. They'd make grenades with ground chilies in them and launch them at attackers and leave their enemies basically choking and blind. Another tactic was to put the chilies in what were kind of like water balloons. So they'd ferment and then burst on impact, releasing all their noxious, painful gases.

• 18:28Nicola Twilley?

  Cynthia was taking notes, clearly.

• 18:30Cynthia Graber?

  I don't know how to defend myself here. I promise, I don't have a vendetta against Nikki. I've been keeping secret all these years.

• 18:35Nicola Twilley?

  Long story short, capsaicin is a powerful weapon in the hands of your enemies. Thank you, Cynthia. This is not even just a historical curiosity. The Indian Army has been working on a chili grenade as a non-lethal but very effective weapon.

• 18:50Cynthia Graber?

  But of course, as we've already said, the chili pepper's burn is something that a lot of us find pleasant and exciting in somewhat smaller doses.

• 18:57Nicola Twilley?

  Although the right dose varies by person. Some people genetically have fewer receptors that get triggered by capsaicin, so they feel less pain from hot chilies. And you can also train yourself to feel less heat just by eating hotter chilies regularly. Scientists think your receptors get less receptive if you're constantly feeling the burn.

• 19:18Cynthia Graber?

  But what if you've accidentally gone a little too far in your chili pepper training regimen and the burn feels, well, really burny? What do you do? Coming up after the break.

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• 21:26Cynthia Graber?

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• 21:30Speaker 06

  For the most part, the way you quench the burn of chili peppers is with time. So you quench it with suffering. You can ameliorate the effects while the burn is subsiding because unfortunately, the burn is occurring because the molecules have gotten into the cells of your mouth. And once they're in, you can't really get them back out again. So you have to deal with the consequences of their being in there.

• 21:59Nicola Twilley?

  Thanks, Harold. But yes, his doom and gloom is true. The bits of capsaicin that have already bound to your receptors, there's not much you can do. Pam says you can get some very temporary relief by drinking something cold. Cold obviously counteracts the sensation of heat. But capsaicin isn't water soluble, so cold water won't help for long.

• 22:22Cynthia Graber?

  But there'll be more capsaicin molecules and bits of pepper still floating around on your tongue and in your mouth. And you can cut them off before they manage to bind with the receptors in your mouth. One way is to wash them away with something fatty because capsaicin is soluble in oil.

• 22:35Nicola Twilley?

  And you can even break the chemical bonds of these free-floating bits of capsaicin using one of the proteins in milk. So dairy is your friend. It's fatty, and it has this magic protein.

• 22:46Speaker 07

  And if you look at cuisines where they use a lot of that, it's often the case that they will have a milk-based drink, like in India, a lassi, or a yogurt dip somewhere nearby to quell the burn of the capsaicin.

• 23:02Cynthia Graber?

  And if you want to combine all three, a milk product, lots of fat, and something really cold, I recommend ice cream. That's what worked for me after our tasting was done.

• 23:10Nicola Twilley?

  What's more questionable in its efficacy is the classic accompaniment to a spicy curry, beer. Capsaicin is soluble in alcohol.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  The problem with beer is that unless it's a British ale, it's going to be more or less carbonated. And carbonation triggers acid sensations. And it turns out that acidity is another thing that can actually aggravate the receptor that reports that capsaicin is there.

• 23:40Speaker 07

  And perhaps if you drink enough beer, you stop worrying about the capsaicin burn. And that's really where the relief comes from. It's a much more cortical effect or relief of anxiety about it.

• 23:53Cynthia Graber?

  I definitely wanted to be distracted from the burn in my mouth, but I didn't pick up any booze because we had more tasting to do.

• 23:59Nicola Twilley?

  After the tip-in, we spooned yogurt all over our burning tongues and commiserated. I feel personally, if I had been the ancestral person who had encountered those in the wild, I would have been like, wow, I'm never putting that in my mouth again. But

• 24:15Cynthia Graber?

  But good for them.

• 24:16Nicola Twilley?

  Good for them.

• 24:17Cynthia Graber?

  After cooling down, we decided to take a step back and taste a mild pepper. We followed Marisol's advice and moved on to taste another one of the five species at Chinense.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Capsicin Chinense has cultivars all over, different colors, different shades, different levels of heat. For example, one of the favorite peppers of Peruvian cooks is something called Ajipanka.

• 24:39Nicola Twilley?

  So we each opened up our jar of Ajipanka.

• 24:42Cynthia Graber?

  Smells really good.

• 24:45Cynthia Graber?

  Ooh, that's lovely.

• 24:47Nicola Twilley?

  We shouldn't have done the other one first.

• 24:49Cynthia Graber?

  No, because now I can't tell if this is spicy or not.

• 24:51Nicola Twilley?

  Yeah. At the moment, it has no spice to me.

• 24:54Cynthia Graber?

  I think it has a tiny bit of heat.

• 24:56Nicola Twilley?

  I'm having a little more of this.

• 24:59Cynthia Graber?

  It's really good.

• 24:59Nicola Twilley?

  Mmm. I'm starting to be able to taste again, and it's nice.

• 25:03Cynthia Graber?

  It was fruity, a tiny bit earthy, and it had just a little hint of heat. It was a really mild and lovely pepper.

• 25:09Nicola Twilley?

  Staying in Peru, but with yet another different species of chili pepper, we moved on to Ají Amarillo. It's a begatim. The Ají Amarillo is Amarillo. It's definitely yellow.

• 25:22Cynthia Graber?

  It is indeed. It's very yellow. You're going to feel a little heat with this. It was one of my favorites.

• 25:27Nicola Twilley?

  Okay.

• 25:28Cynthia Graber?

  Oh, my gosh, this tastes like Peru to me. While Ajipanka might be popular in Peru, Ají Amarillo is probably Peru's national chili. I had it on dishes all the time when I was traveling there. It's really common in a sauce for potato dish and also in ceviche. I even had an Ají Amarillo ice cream there that I still dream about.

• 25:46Nicola Twilley?

  It's delicious.

• 25:46Cynthia Graber?

  Mmm.

• 25:47Nicola Twilley?

  It's rounded.

• 25:48Cynthia Graber?

  So good.

• 25:48Nicola Twilley?

  It's warm. It dissipates pretty quickly. Like, I'm not left with this lingering burn.

• 25:56Cynthia Graber?

  No, that's true.

• 25:57Nicola Twilley?

  I like it. This is my favorite so far by quite a long shot.

• 26:00Cynthia Graber?

  It's so good.

• 26:00Nicola Twilley?

  And finally, species number four.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Capsicin frutenses. And just think of Tabasco. Tabasco sauce is made with capsicin frutenses. Very specific in terms of flavor. It's sharp. It does not have that muskiness of the capsicin chinense, but it does have this almost vinegary quality. And most people who work with the capsicin frutenses know that is fantastic for table sauces.

• 26:29Cynthia Graber?

  Our frutenses chili that we'd bought was weary, weary. There are these wrinkly dried peppers that are about the size of a very large plump raisin. I had to look them up online because I'd never heard of them. So this is from Guiana. It's a staple spice from the South American region, so common that most Guineans' kids grow up eating them. Delicious tangy flavor, it says. Delicious tangy flavor. Delicious tangy flavor plus a lot of heat. Okay.

• 26:53Nicola Twilley?

  You're just saying the kid stuff to make me feel like a wuss here, but anyway.

• 26:57Cynthia Graber?

  Oh, my God. Oh, wait, I have to swallow it. I don't think I can. No, I couldn't swallow it.

• 27:03Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, come on, you have to swallow it. I haven't tried yet.

• 27:05Cynthia Graber?

  No, I spit it out and swallowed just some of the seeds. I have to tell you, my head is sweating, like my scalp is sweating.

• 27:11Nicola Twilley?

  My nose is running.

• 27:13Cynthia Graber?

  Oh, my God, Nikki, my mouth hurts so badly.

• 27:15Nicola Twilley?

  Now my mouth hurts. I'm going to have some yogurt.

• 27:17Cynthia Graber?

  I'm writhing standing here.

• 27:19Nicola Twilley?

  Did you get a flavor I didn't really get? Oh, God, my mouth hurts. What am I supposed to do? It hurts so much. Why want the yogurt?

• 27:29Nicola Twilley?

  Make it stop.

• 27:30Cynthia Graber?

  Wow. Yeah, that was something.

• 27:33Nicola Twilley?

  It's not really stopping. I have a lot of respect for Guinean children now. And also a question. How did a spicy South American berry that I really regretted eating become such a staple in West Africa? I mean, how did the chili take over the world?

• 27:51Cynthia Graber?

  This unsurprisingly will take us back to when Europeans showed up in Central and South America. Columbus and his crew on their very first voyage in 1492, they were served ají with their food by the natives in the Caribbean. And so Columbus brought some of these precious berries back to Spain with him.

• 28:05Nicola Twilley?

  When Columbus set sail on the Ocean Blue, he was supposed to actually be figuring out a new supply chain for black pepper, which Europeans relied on and loved to spice up their food. That's why he called these new hot berries peppers. They were like peppercorns, but on steroids. And peppercorns were a super valuable spice.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  And when he landed in Spain, besides bringing samples of other foods, even like turkeys, he gave a glowing report of the potential of the ají. He called it a spice for large commercial possibilities.

• 28:42Nicola Twilley?

  And he wasn't wrong. Chili peppers caught on quickly in Spain. Other new world crops like tomatoes and potatoes were initially thought to be a little suspect. Chocolate was popular, but only for the elite. But chili peppers were a smash hit with all sectors of society.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  If you had a hot pepper plant growing in your garden, then you wouldn't have to spend a lot of money on peppercorns, which were very expensive. And there is a point that everybody was using it.

• 29:07Cynthia Graber?

  You couldn't grow black pepper in your garden in Spain, but you could grow chili peppers pretty much anywhere.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  In fact, in literature, Spanish literature, there's a reference that with peppers, the lord ate as well as a slave. So there was a democratization of the use of peppers in Spain.

• 29:23Nicola Twilley?

  Like the women Marisol saw using the ají to make a very Spartan diet into a delicious cuisine in Peru, Spanish peasants started relying on chili peppers to do the same thing.

• 29:34Cynthia Graber?

  Chili peppers became so popular in Spain that the Spaniards even developed their own varieties, like the pimentón and padron peppers.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  And every region has a different predilection for particular peppers. For example, if you go to the Rioja, it's something called pimiento chorizo, which translates as the pepper for chorizos, for sausages.

• 29:54Nicola Twilley?

  Spain's neighbors, the Portuguese, also got into the chili pepper action early, and they were really the ones that spread chilies around the globe. Portuguese sailors brought chilies to West Africa and to the Middle East and to Southeast Asia.

• 30:08Cynthia Graber?

  The Portuguese brought peppers to India, where they quickly became essential. Chili is central to the cuisines of Bhutan and Korea. But arguably the largest country that today is the most closely identified with a chili pepper among all the many nations that couldn't possibly imagine eating without chilies? I'd say maybe, probably, the winner is China. That's coming up after this break.

• 30:33Cynthia Graber?

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• 32:03Nicola Twilley?

  Like everywhere, the chili pepper first came into China through port cities and it was quickly adopted, at least in certain regions. From the 17th century onwards, then there was pretty systematic records about the food people eat in these regions. Guizhou, Hunan, Hubei and Sichuan were spicy.

• 32:25Cynthia Graber?

  Edward Wang is head of the Asian Studies Program at Rowan University. And he says those regions adopted chilies for a number of reasons. First and most importantly, because the people who lived there were poor, like in Hangzhou, one of the poorest regions in China.

• 32:37Nicola Twilley?

  And particularly that region lacks salt. So before chili peppers, they actually use vinegar to spice up their food. That was one of the reasons that people use chili peppers, the taste of like hot to replace the shortage of salt. The chili pepper is a remarkably adaptable and unfussy plant and it grows well in all kinds of different environments. humid, dry, mountainous, coastal. So that helped it spread.

• 33:09Cynthia Graber?

  And then in China, chilies were even more of a hit because of their color.

• 33:13Nicola Twilley?

  That definitely has an impact because red is a festive color, right? So in weddings and in New Year, major holidays, people hand like dried chili peppers at their doors. That's definitely bring like a certain type of happiness to their household. Yeah, that possibly also adds some reason to the popularity of chili peppers in those regions.

• 33:42Cynthia Graber?

  So chili peppers were pretty unauspicious and they were relatively free since you could grow them yourself. And Edward says this last advantage was particularly key because poor people in China, like in South America, they had a pretty bland, starchy diet of a lot of grains. Edward said food was divided into grain food and non-grain food.

• 33:59Nicola Twilley?

  So that's why initially that's why chili pepper was adopted as like a salt. Because if you just eat the grain food, then it became, I mean, was maybe too bland. So you need to have something else to consume them, right? And so in Chinese language, you have words like called shafa, means down the grain. Down the grain, like literally get it down you. So they will use chili peppers or salt or pickles to down the food. But in China, even among people who could afford more than just grains, chilies fit into a certain way of thinking about food. A culinary style that valued combining lots of different tastes to make a meal.

• 34:43Cynthia Graber?

  At one point in time, Europeans ate richly spiced foods too. But by the time the chili pepper came around, this wasn't a strong tradition. Europeans had started to focus more on the essence of the meat or fish itself rather than combining sour and spicy and sweet in one dish in a way that was particularly valued in some regions in China.

• 35:01Nicola Twilley?

  Chili peppers didn't really catch on in Northern Europe at all. And in Italy, they were carefully bred to remove all their spiciness to become bell peppers.

• 35:10Cynthia Graber?

  In China, though, spicy chilies became so deeply entrenched in some regions that many Chinese think the plant is native.

• 35:16Nicola Twilley?

  Most of the people were answering that, wow, that's from Sichuan, from Hunan. They would, they would consider it just like the tomato, right? Tomato, people wouldn't think that it was like from the Americas. So it was so become, I mean, so adopted into the Chinese cooking. Chili peppers have become entwined with Chinese identity. They show up in poetry and slang. They embody all sorts of positive qualities. Heart temper and courage, manhood, maybe masculinity. For girls, you have a term called la maiz. La means spicy and la maiz is also, I would say it's pretty positive to describe a woman,

• 35:59Nicola Twilley?

  you know, who is more kind of adventurous and not shy, you know, not like timid. So that's the opposite to the traditional type of Chinese woman. And they will regard those women who became like entrepreneurs. I would say, oh, well, it's, she's from that region. She's so risk taking, right? And those are all, I would say mostly positive images. There was no negative associations with eating chili peppers.

• 36:29Cynthia Graber?

  And even in regions of China that had a tradition of bland or foods that didn't adopt the chili pepper originally, well, today they're getting spicy too.

• 36:36Nicola Twilley?

  In the 60, I mean, 1960s, 70s, when I grew up, chili peppers were not that popular among certain regions. They may, might be popular in Sichuan, in southwestern regions like Guizhou, like Hunan, those provinces. And we were known that these people love spicy food. But now, of course, my relatives, my friends in Shanghai are becoming addicts to spicy food. This is why my interests became like inspired. I would say why over the last 30 years, spicy food become so popular? Edward's theory is that it's because of mass migration in China in the last couple of decades.

• 37:21Nicola Twilley?

  Poorer people from regions that relied on chilies to get the grain down, moved to richer cities to work and they brought their peppers with them. And now, of course, even in Guangdong. Guangdong's cooking was very mild. I would say they emphasize on freshness and lot of fish and so on. But again, if you go to Guangzhou today, then you will find a lot of spicy food.

• 37:46Cynthia Graber?

  Everywhere feels like it's getting spicier today. Food in America used to be thought of as pretty bland, although I do have a point of pride here that the first ad for hot sauce in America was published in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1807. Not that it had a huge impact on traditional New England cuisine.

• 38:01Nicola Twilley?

  Honestly, in general, the North American chili scene was pretty mild. Don't comment me Texans with your chili queens, et cetera. I'm talking in general compared to say China or south of the border in Mexico. The US was just not especially spicy.

• 38:16Cynthia Graber?

  That's been changing. In 2004, hot sauce and salsa finally conquered ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise to become the very two top condiments sold in the US. Congrats, America, good job.

• 38:26Nicola Twilley?

  And you know, America, we're in it to win it. All those lovely chili peppers developed elsewhere in the world are nice, but we want the hottest of them all.

• 38:37Cynthia Graber?

  Speak for yourself. I am not part of that way.

• 38:39Nicola Twilley?

  I'm channeling the chili heads and there are a lot of them out there. You are embarking on a culinary journey.

• 38:49Nicola Twilley?

  I love the pain of spicy food.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  That will probably not rest well with you. It awakens the soul. Woo, it's hell night, baby. It is absolutely a trend and I don't think it's a trend that's going to end anytime soon. I thought when we first discovered the ghost pepper back in 2006, I believe, we were like, okay, this, this thing's really hot. People are really interested in it.

• 39:16Nicola Twilley?

  The ghost pepper is known as the butchelokia, which means Bhutanese pepper in the local language. It is a mix of a frutescience and a chenise and it had been growing in Assam and India. No one knows for exactly how long, but it wasn't widely known outside the region at all until the 1990s. And it's credited with starting the super hot revolution.

• 39:37Cynthia Graber?

  Denise is a breeder at the Chili Pepper Institute, as we mentioned, and she pays very close attention to what people want to eat.

• 39:43Speaker 05

  And then four or five years later, we discovered the maruga scorpion and it was twice as hot as the ghost pepper. And we were like, okay, people are really interested in this too. And then just, you know, hundreds of thousands of hot sauces out there that are made with these super hot chilies. And it blows my mind because I, I prefer flavor. And when it gets to like 1 million Scoville heat units, it's nothing but pain. And you're, you don't care what it tastes like at that point.

• 40:10Nicola Twilley?

  Just as a point of reference, that weary, weary that set our mouths on fire was about 225,000 Scoville and a jalapeno maxes out at a puny 8,000 Scoville.

• 40:22Cynthia Graber?

  But what do those thousands even mean? Where does this Scoville thing come from?

• 40:25Speaker 05

  So it was actually developed in the 1950s by scientist. His name was Wilbur Scoville and he wanted to. Figure out a way to give people an understanding of how hot chili peppers were. So he set up a human subject taste panel and gave them samples. And every time they tasted it, he would dilute it. And then they'd taste again, and then he'd dilute it again. Every single time they felt heat, he would dilute it. And that would be a single Scoville unit.

• 40:58Nicola Twilley?

  So if you had to dilute the chili pepper solution 5,000 times before you couldn't feel the burn, you'd end up with a pepper that was rated at 5,000 Scoville units.

• 41:06Cynthia Graber?

  If this seems like a weird and kind of arbitrary measuring system to you, it is. People have very different sensitivities. Scoville did try to get around individual differences by having a panel of five people.

• 41:16Nicola Twilley?

  But there's a larger issue that Pam pointed out: desensitization.

• 41:21Speaker 07

  One interesting thing about capsaicin is that you can have this acute desensitization where you eat it and you consume for maybe five or 10 minutes, and then you stop and you wait about 15 minutes. And when you go back to it again, it will not have anywhere near the same burn or experience as before. And so you can do some pretty interesting challenges with people if you kind of pregame and then pick up like a buffalo wing or something very spicy when they haven't had the opportunity to pregame, because you will be acutely desensitized. And you can eat it with absolutely no effect, whereas that person will be screaming at that point in time.

• 42:04Cynthia Graber?

  So pranks aside, what this means is that Scoville units are kind of ridiculous. The original setup Wilbur created relies on the tester knowing when they can't taste the spice of the pepper anymore, but the pepper is making it harder to taste pepper.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  So I think people are moving to simply giving capsaicin levels, which is something that's objective and easily measurable. But Scoville units are still much referred to.

• 42:29Cynthia Graber?

  Even though today, scientists like Denise and her colleagues do measure the actual capsaicin in any given new variety of pepper, and then they can convert that to existing Scoville units using a formula.

• 42:39Nicola Twilley?

  Because Scoville units are what the chili heads are chasing. Before the 1990s, there were only a couple of known chili peppers that were rated above 300,000 Scoville heat units: the Scotch bonnet and the habanero.

• 42:52Cynthia Graber?

  But now, the Guinness Book of Records has a couple dozen varieties competing for the absolute hottest, and they are all over a million Scoville units. These are called superhots.

• 43:02Nicola Twilley?

  And it all started when Denise's colleague at New Mexico State collected the butchelokia, or ghost pepper, near Assam in India, and brought it back to test and study it. Turns out, super hot peppers are botanically different from regular peppers. The capsaicin isn't confined to just the white placenta stuff.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  We discovered probably about six or seven years ago at New Mexico State University that a lot of these super hot varieties, like the ghost pepper and the scorpion, they actually produce these vesicles that house the capsaicin in their walls as well. So that's why a lot of these superhots are really, really hot chilies and produce a lot of capsaicin.

• 43:44Cynthia Graber?

  So that's the biology of the superhots. But now superhots have become a competitive sport. On the plant side, breeders are racing to see just how hot they can get a pepper to be.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the hottest anything can be is actually 16 million Scoville heat units, and that's pure capsaicin.

• 44:02Nicola Twilley?

  But actual chili peppers are nowhere near that yet, and they never will be. Capsaicin is a costly molecule for the pepper to manufacture, and a plant can't produce more than a certain amount without failing at all the other things they need to do to survive as a plant.

• 44:15Cynthia Graber?

  But breeders don't know what that limit is, and they don't think they've reached it yet. They're still pushing the limits of plant-induced pain.

• 44:21Nicola Twilley?

  Because chili heads love it. And they are also in a competition for who can eat the spiciest pepper of all. Come on down. I salivate for hot food. We create some of the hottest food in the world. Hot food, please. What we have got in front of us is a basket of hatred. Each person will be given a pepper from this basket. They will have a maximum of 15 seconds to eat that pepper. It's time to reach for that jug. You lied to me. Oh.

• 44:53Nicola Twilley?

  That's what got me. God.

• 44:57Nicola Twilley?

  Okay, but a weary, weary was already too hot to even taste the flavor for me. Why on earth are people setting their mouths on fire with a million Scoville pepper? Why would you even want to do that?

• 45:08Speaker 07

  This is an area of research where people have looked at the degree to which people who like capsaicin in large amounts have a tendency to be sensation seekers. It's almost like you are exposing yourself to something that is dangerous, but not really dangerous. Right? So it's like a roller coaster ride. If you assume that they've maintained the roller coaster properly, it's going to be scary, but you're pretty sure that you're going to come out okay on the other end. The same thing with capsaicin. It's sort of triggering the brain into, I'm doing something dangerous here. And then you have this post danger euphoria from having survived the experience with

• 45:52Speaker 07

  nothing more than maybe a little bit of soreness on your tongue.

• 45:55Cynthia Graber?

  Unsurprisingly to me, chili competitions tend to be a kind of chest-beating macho type thing, not my speed.

• 46:00Nicola Twilley?

  Plus, it's not all fun and games. One guy who ate ghost pepper puree at a contest in 2016 ended up in hospital with an inch-long tear in his esophagus from the irritation. The doctors who treated him said it was because of all the post chili vomiting.

• 46:17Cynthia Graber?

  Another reason to skip the chili head competition. But unfortunately, Nikki and I had our own tasting to do, and the weary, weary we tried wasn't the hottest. The Carolina Reaper is considered the hottest pepper available today. It's about a million and a half Scoville units. And as you listeners already know, I bought two jars from a local store and I shipped one to Nikki.

• 46:36Nicola Twilley?

  Are you ready?

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Will I ever be ready?

• 46:42Speaker 05

  Do you have some?

• 46:43Nicola Twilley?

  I have some. I'm gonna just take the tiniest bit on tiny bit of my tongue. Okay, are you ready?

• 46:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. One, three, two, one.

• 46:51Cynthia Graber?

  Now, before our big reveal, we were warned by the owner of Christina's Spice Store that we should just dip the tiniest edge of our pinky finger into the powder and taste just the tiniest few grains of it. And after eating the entire weary, weary, or rather spitting it out, I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to minimize the coming pain.

• 47:09Nicola Twilley?

  After inhaling it the day before, I too was a little wary. I took like a forensically tiny amount on my pinky and put it in my mouth.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  Okay, it just.

• 47:25Cynthia Graber?

  Like it's, it, my throat hurts.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  I was like, there's nothing. And now there's.

• 47:32Cynthia Graber?

  And I'm not putting the rest of what's on my, um, my finger into my mouth because I'm.

• 47:37Speaker 05

  I touched my finger to my lips on the way out, and that is burning like.

• 47:41Cynthia Graber?

  I did not do that, and I'm not going to.

• 47:43Speaker 05

  Don't.

• 47:43Cynthia Graber?

  I think I'm gonna rinse my finger.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  You're smart. You're a smart lady.

• 47:49Cynthia Graber?

  But, but it does hurt my throat.

• 47:51Speaker 05

  My throat hurts. My nose is running.

• 47:53Nicola Twilley?

  We went and washed our hands and ate some yogurt and coughed and blew our noses.

• 47:58Cynthia Graber?

  My mouth hurts really badly.

• 48:00Speaker 05

  It really hurts. Like, it actually hurts. Still.

• 48:04Cynthia Graber?

  Yeah, it's pain. No, like, it, it's like, I, like, serious pain in my mouth.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  I mean, this Carolina Reaper, I'm never gonna touch this Carolina Reaper again. I don't know why it even exists. It's horrible.

• 48:13Cynthia Graber?

  This pain went on for many minutes.

• 48:16Speaker 05

  Why is it still burning? Okay, this is, I'm just gonna go spin some yogurt into my mouth for a while.

• 48:23Cynthia Graber?

  I'm gonna go lie down. Okay, bye.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 48:27Cynthia Graber?

  Don't worry, our experience with the weary, weary and the Carolina Reaper did not put us off chilies. We still enjoy hot sauce and chili crisp and mole and chorizo and aleppo and orfah flakes and more liberally. We are committed chili lovers.

• 48:39Nicola Twilley?

  Just not chili heads.

• 48:40Cynthia Graber?

  A quick shout out to the local Somerville store, Christina's Spices, which does ship all around the country. They have the best selection of chilies I've found anywhere online, even compared to places that specialize in chilies. We'll have a link if you want to do a tasting yourself on our website, gastropod.com.

• 48:54Nicola Twilley?

  And if you want to do a tasting, you will want the New Mexico State University Chili Pepper Institute Chili Tasting Wheel, which Denise helped develop. It's got heat profile notes and flavor notes, and it's a lot of fun to use.

• 49:08Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Marisol Priscilla, Denise Kuhn, Harold McGee, Pam Dalton, and Edward Wang. We have links to their books and research on our website, gastropod.com.

• 49:16Nicola Twilley?

  There's a bunch of chili stories we couldn't tell this episode, and we saved the forgotten story of the man whose work founded the hatch chili phenomenon for our special supporters newsletter, which you can sign up for on our website, gastropod.com/support. And we'll be back in a couple of weeks.

• 49:35Cynthia Graber?

  Till then.

• 49:38Cynthia Graber?

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• 50:09Cynthia Graber?

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