Jacob kindly suggested I nibble the world’s hottest chilli, but I’m no sucker. I’ll give it the full treatment.
The Economist has devoted a long article to what it cutely calls Global Warming, exploring Why the world has taken to chilies. This is something I’ve had a long-term interest in, as good an excuse to ramble as any.
First off, Luigi’s nibble last year of the World’s Hottest Chile was clearly no such thing, as even then Michael Michaud had made the selection that was to become Dorset Naga. ((Question: Did he register the variety? Apparently yes, although I forgot to ask when I last saw him.
Second question: Just how repeatable are those measurements anyway?
Third question: Aside from marketing, who cares that much about the numbers?)) That said, to my inexpert eye Dorset Naga and Bhut Jolokia do look very similar. Any chance of a DNA read-out?
Secondly, Michael Michaud is an all around good egg, and I hope he is profiting from his crazy hot chili. He and Joy, at South Devon Chilli Farm, have been unfailingly generous with their time, expertise and encouragement, and not just to me.
Then there’s the whole question of why people willingly subject themselves to the pain of hot chillies. ((Forget about bacteriocidal properties or any of that stuff.)) Long ago and far away, ((1986, in Laredo, TX, and elsewhere, with the much-loved and sorely missed Marion Zunz.)) best beloved, I made a television documentary called Why dogs don’t like chilli but some like it hot, which explored this very question. We spoke at length with Paul Rozin, who has studied the topic, and much else about food and taste, in depth and who has concluded that what may begin as thrill-seeking show-off behaviour becomes not quite an addiction, but certainly a craving.
Which, surprise, surprise, is exactly what The Economist concludes, more than 20 years on.
[P]ain relief. The bloodstream floods with endorphins—the closest thing to morphine that the body produces. The result is a high. And the more capsaicin you ingest, the bigger and better it gets.
…
In the same way as young people may come to like alcohol, tobacco and coffee (all of which initially taste nasty, but deliver a pleasurable chemical kick), chili-eating normally starts off as a social habit, bolstered by what Mr Rozin calls “benign masochism”: doing something painful and seemingly dangerous, in the knowledge that it won’t do any permanent harm. The adrenalin kick plus the natural opiates form an unbeatable combination for thrill-seekers.
At least that much is unchanged, unlike the holder of the World’s Hottest Chili.
The first link be broken, man…
http://http://www…
Why is it – you think – that some peoples go outrageously overboard with chili consumption (to my taste, that is), while others are quite careful in keeping the spiciness under control. Chance? Human genetics? Alternative addictives?
I know a number of people that make severe use of chili peppers (although not at the dorset naga level); and they tend to increase their doses each time I see them. For me, it is first a social habit -as The Economist notes- but then possibilities come up: 1. you want to have the hottest mouth or 2. capsaicin is somehow addictive. Societies with chili pepper consumption culture will tend to mantain it, so for them it would be option 1, but people snorting “pink fix” could be in option 2.
@Onkel Bob – Sorry Bob. Thanks. Fixed.
@Julian
What I referred to are the strong differences between groups of people. There is more chili used in the tropics than in the temperate zones (leading some to suggest that is because of chili’s anti-bacterial properties that help conserve meat — or would it rather help in masking the rotten taste? — something Jeremy dismisses in a footnote, without elaborating). But it is not a simple North-South gradient anyway. There is also West (hot) vs. East (not so hot) Africa. Or East Asia (Philippines, not so hot) vs. Central Asia (Sri Lanka, hot). So I am curious to know what people have proposed to explain these patterns. Is it all “historical” (chance) or is there more to it?
@Robert
Jeremy and some thinking have led me to think that the bacteriological hypothesis is only a part of the picture. There are other ways to preserve foods (salt, smoking, etc.) that would make chillies fairly marginal among the abundant alternatives.
Far more important, I think, is simply the availability of the hot stuff in the inmediate environment. Hotness in chillies is a function of ecology. The article Robert cites doesn’t even mention this as a possible factor!
A second factor is the path-dependency of chili consumption. If you grow up in a “hot” culture, you start to get the capsaicin through breast-feeding (and perhaps even through your umblical cord?) . You are an addict before you know it. In a “cold” culture, however, you don’t know what you miss and you are less likely to become an addict.
My availability hypothesis could be tested, I guess, by looking at the spatial distribution of native hot-lovers and wild hot chilies. Matching the pre-globalization patterns, so to say. Any volunteers?
The next big question then, is: what is the biological function of capsaicin in chillies? Does it deter predators? Does it prevent diseases? What’s it doing there? What, apart from human selecction, keeps it there?
Question answered in the link I gave above (“ecology”). The function of hotness is protection against Fusarium-carrying insects.
Although the article Robert cites does not explicitly speak about the close relationship between ecology and hotness (and it doesnt only speak about chili), it explains a relationship between microbial inhibition of spices and mean annual temperature of different countries -a proxy of ecology?- (here I must say I would have never imagined the kind of studies one can make using cooking books!). Hotness, microbial inhibition and plant self-protection (if we take the chili case) are highly correlated as they are all produced/influenced by capsaicinoids. Say, if recipes were developed based on availability of nearby ingredients then ecology and availabilty are highly correlated (am I going too far?).
To resume, the antimicrobial hipotheses is, as Jacob says, a part of the picture, but is highly related with his availability hipothesis, and they are surely quite complementary.
I definitively agree with Jacob’s GIS-based way to test the availability hipothesis. Perhaps not only distribution of hot-lovers would help but also hot-love-intensity and its respective spatial distribution.
I agree with Jacob that ecology is an obvious place to look (in the Americas). But to indulge in something it really does not need not grow where you live. Colombus only ‘discovered’ America because he wanted to get cheap pepper from the Indies. Europeans were paying fortunes for pepper (& nutmeg, mace, and cloves). Ironically, perhaps the biggest effect of his voyage on pepper consumption was the replacement of it by its analogue (sensu David Williams) ‘Spanish pepper’ (as we used to call it at home). Why did chilies replace (and was it really a 1 on 1 replacement?) pepper to make it such a fundamental ingredient of much of Asian cooking? Just the price — that it is so weedy that you do not even need to grow it for a steady supply?
Anyway, wild chilies occur up to Arizona. I know because some of these northern populations were investigated by Joshia Hawksbury and Gary Nabhan. In this paper they say chilies are hot so that they get eaten and dispersed by birds, but left alone by small mammals, which are not good at dispersing there seeds (unfortunately, no human subjects in their research).
Nabham also has a chapter about chilies in his book “Why some like it hot“. He talks about chilies providing continuously high levels of endorphin-like substances, such that the real endorphins no longer work (as was shown in research involving masturbating women). If I recall well, he speculated that chili eaters become very sensitive to pain. Ever noticed character changes when adding more chilies to your diet?
Interesting aspect, the Columbian exchange and Thai chilies. But this is about big-picture ecology, of course, not about taxonomic details. Peppers are peppers.
Arizona chilies: Navajo chefs know chili well.
More about “peppers are peppers”.
Mr. Cristobal Colon maintained that he had found a passage to Asia, and never made a public statement to the contrary.
Makes me think: did he also try to make the Reyes believe that he had found the same “pepper” as ships brought in from Asia?
@Jacob
Don’t think so. Mr. Colón discovered a ‘species of pepper’ (according to what some people says he said when he did so) and called it “pimiento” just because it was, for himself, somehow similar to black pepper. He therefore led to a very big and long -unintentional- misunderstood in Spain. He kept saying that ‘pimientos’ were originary from India, and that they were some kind of pepper.
Cristobal Colón took chile peppers to Spain and within the first important phase of spread everybody thought he was completely right regarding his ‘pimiento’ hypothesis. Just several years later it was defined that chile peppers belong to the Solanaceae family; and much later it was established that the real origin of chili pepper was the Americas and not India.