HOT STUFF
Sometimes a chili pepper is not just a chili pepper
BY MATT GROSS
Illustrations by Austin Hughes
Picture this: One Saturday morning in the mid-1980s, a ten-year-old boy and his mother are roaming the weekly farmers’ market in a college town in western Massachusetts. It’s the end of September, and the stalls are overflowing with the bounty of the Pioneer Valley: stacks of late-season sweet corn, piles of tomatoes, watermelons almost as heavy as the fifth-grader himself. The boy’s attention is caught, however, by a display of cherry peppers—deep-dark red, squat and round, somehow both shiny and dull, and, he suspects, spicy. Spicy: he knows what that means, yet he doesn’t know. He’s eaten Indian food with his parents—chicken tikka was a favorite—and maybe that was in some way spicy, but this little fruit right here, he knows, is something else. He picks one up and looks at the farmer manning the stand. The farmer nods. The boy chomps in without hesitation (where is his mother, anyway?), and his mouth explodes. Never has he felt pain like this. This is no skinned knee, no vaccination. This is electric, unfiltered, living pain that hums and vibrates and will not let go until, minutes later, it crests and relents and recedes into a muted throb, then a memory. And yet—the boy is alive! Undamaged! Oddly joyful! He has faced this danger, let it have its way with him, and emerged not just unscathed but stronger. Through this trial by fire, a chilihead has been born.
This is, you’ve surely guessed, my own origin story as a lover of spicy foods, and I’ve told it so many times that it now takes some effort to fully recall the sensations and not just produce the words that describe them. But those sensations are still there in my memory, and the tale is as true as any we tell of our childhoods: I ate my first chili pepper, it hurt, I survived, and I decided I liked the experience enough to repeat it—enough that today I am, I suppose, an expert on chili peppers (genus Capsicum). I grow peppers in my Brooklyn backyard; I make my own hot sauce, chili oil, kimchi; I help judge hot sauce competitions; I have roamed the world, from the Caribbean to Hungary to Thailand to China and beyond, in search of spicy foods; I’ve written dozens of articles about all of these things; and one of these days, I’ll produce a book about the post-1492 history of chili peppers. All because of that one day when I was ten.
Of course, that’s an insane oversimplification. For one thing, I have no further memory of spicy food until I was sixteen. Maybe there was spicy food in our household, maybe there wasn’t. If so, it meant nothing to me, the pain and elation of that first experience forgotten entirely—or maybe pushed aside by other adolescent experiences? For much of my teenage years, I was a skateboarder, and the topography of wounds across my shins and the rainbow of bruises on my hips testified to a new relationship with willingly embraced pain. Who needs habaneros when you have asphalt? Still, I remember hot sauces in the pantry: Tiger Sauce, Melinda’s. I remember a fiery larb at a Thai restaurant, jalapeño slices served with phở at a Vietnamese place.
Those memories are there, but they don’t feel significant. I know that when I began to cook for myself, during college, I made a lot of Southeast Asian food, so I must have been eating spice. But no sense memory leaps out at me. When I graduated, I moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where every meal could be supplemented with finely chopped red chilies or a spoonful of garlicky, vinegary hot sauce. Yet heat is not at the core of my memories there. Loneliness, sexual frustration, existential angst, but not the pain I now seek out.
Still, something must have been evolving through my early adulthood. In my mid-twenties, on a vacation to Mexico with the woman who is now my wife, I conjured up the Spanish to ask a resort waiter, “Tiene una salsa más picante?” A few years later, I was the copy editor who kept a green-capped bottle of Sriracha on my desk for lunches and late closes at New York Magazine. Perhaps whatever had awakened within me at age ten had gone latent and was starting to reemerge. Perhaps every birth requires a rebirth?
Or perhaps this is all just … normal. In the many countries and cultures I’ve visited where chilies are a fundamental part of the cuisine, you rarely hear origin stories such as mine. Food can be more spicy or less spicy. That’s just the way it is, and if you live in Chongqing or Mumbai, it’s a fact you must deal with from an early age. Most likely, you’ll fall into the category of “Eats some level of spice,” alongside everyone else, and never even think about it until some White, Western journalist asks you.
That’s not to say there’s no variation or self-awareness in spicy-food countries. In Thailand, people debate which regional cuisine is spicier: the northeast, where you order papaya salad by saying how many chilies to pound it with, or the south, whose sour, soupy curries are known for their long, lingering burn. In Jamaica, older men sometimes carry Scotch bonnet peppers in their pockets, to slice up and add to any meal they happen to encounter—this is seen by younger people as cute, maybe a cliché, but also a little over-the-top, spice-wise. And nearly every country has symbolized chilies to some extent, with proverbs like this Brazilian one: Passarinho que come pimenta sabe o cu que tem. The bird that eats peppers knows its own ass. In other words, actions have consequences.
Other countries, meanwhile, have started capitalizing on what was, until recently, their unremarked-upon love of chilies. Chili pepper festivals have taken off in China, from Beijing to Hunan Province, complete with pepper-eating competitions and viral images of people sitting in pools filled with chilies. In Indonesia, a man who worked in advertising told me he’d noticed the word “Pedas!” (“Spicy!”) increasingly emblazoned on bags of snack chips—a brand-new way to market in a country where sambal, or hot sauce, is a de facto feature of nearly every meal.
(There’s a whole gender thing to go into here as well: a 2015 study found that men tend to like spicy foods for social/status reasons, while women like chilies because of how they taste/feel. In Sichuan province, the spiciest thing I ate was málà rabbit heads—really just pure fire. Later I found out this was considered a “ladies’ snack” because it was all about plucking the delicate shreds of meat from the rabbit skull.)
On one level, this is just late-stage capitalism, but it’s also something more interesting: the realization that what is utterly normal for you—as a country, a culture, an individual—is not actually a universal experience. In fact, it’s unique in its contours, its history, its expression. It’s part of what makes you you.
Masochism is nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subject’s own self.
—Sigmund Freud
And so maybe that was what was going on with me for nearly three decades: I liked spicy food more than most people, but did not understand to what degree, and therefore it didn’t mean anything to me. That changed, I think I can say, in 2013, when I took the stage at a hot sauce convention to compete in a Guinness World Record attempt to speed-eat three Carolina Reaper chilies, which are about 500 to 1,000 times spicier than a jalapeño—that is, they are the world’s hottest peppers. I was one of about a dozen contestants (mostly but not entirely male), and the only one to announce to the audience of 300 that I was going to try to really enjoy the flavor.
“I’m not just willing to suffer, to embrace my suffering, and to share my suffering—I’ve got an unusual level of comfort with it. It’s been with me forever.”
That was incorrect. I did not enjoy the flavor. I didn’t have time. I chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed—finishing in just under 22 seconds, last place. For another 60 seconds I had to wait onstage, to make sure I didn’t vomit, and during that minute, the burn set in. My throat swelled, sweat beaded across my face. My ears popped. I craved milk—its protein casein counteracts the capsaicin in chilies—but I’m lactose-intolerant, so once I left the stage I drank water and just tried to wait out the most intense chili pain I’d ever experienced. After 15 awful minutes, that pain subsided, as I knew it would, and the endorphins kicked in. I felt great, ass-kickingly fucking great, and not just for psychophysiological reasons: as I wandered through the convention, people kept coming up to me, congratulating me on my performance, for having the guts, the literal guts, to even attempt such masochism.
This was not something I was used to: the approval of a crowd. And I’d earned it not by doing something extraordinary but by just being myself, only more so. I had embraced the person I’d been becoming since I was ten, and—in transforming my masochism from private and personal to public and performative—started to figure out what made me different from everyone else: I’m not just willing to suffer, to embrace my suffering, and to share my suffering—I’ve got an unusual level of comfort with it. It’s been with me forever. It’s my soft old T-shirt. It’s my theme song.
Frankly, it’s not such a big difference: we each inflict upon ourselves a certain amount of pain, intentionally or otherwise, and we each decide, intentionally or otherwise, what level we can stand and eventually find our own level of tolerance for the pain. Just because your level is low does not mean you’re not a masochist. We are all masochists to some degree, and the chili peppers have simply helped me to pinpoint my personal degree.
Or maybe that’s just what I’m saying now, at this particular point in my life, having told this Carolina Reaper tale enough times that its visceral memory exists mostly as words. Well, mostly but not entirely. Because I can recall all too well the blazing pain that, an hour after the contest, gripped the core of my being and would not let go. It wracked my body as I stumbled through Penn Station, as I squirmed on the subway home, as I walked my leafy Brooklyn neighborhood, and as I lay moaning in bed all night—until, in an epiphany I won’t soon forget, I realized I had heartburn, drank a glass of water mixed with baking soda, and felt near-instantaneous relief. As they say in Malaysia, Siapa makan cili dia terasa pedas. He who eats chili gets burned. Actions have consequences. And mostly they’re worth it. ■
Matt Gross has been the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler (2006–10) and editor of BonAppetit.com, Boston.com, and Realtor.com. He is the author of The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World.
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023