{"id":29563,"date":"2016-01-01T01:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-01-01T06:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29563"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:32:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:32:41","slug":"qotd-when-capsaicin-invaded-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/01\/qotd-when-capsaicin-invaded-america\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When capsaicin invaded America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Consider spicy-hot food \u2014 and consider how recent it is as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros<\/em> and rellenos<\/em>, nam pla<\/em> and sambal ulek<\/em>. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn\u2019t always that way.<\/p>\n

In fact it wasn\u2019t that way until quite recently, historically speaking. I\u2019ve enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant populations. The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on the way is interesting too.<\/p>\n

(Oh. And for those of you who don\u2019t understand the appeal? It\u2019s all about endorphin rush, like a runner\u2019s high. Pepper-heads like me have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem, inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has been clinically verified.)<\/p>\n

Baseline: Thirty years ago. The early 1970s. I\u2019m a teenager, just back in the U.S. from years spent overseas. Spicy-hot food is pretty rare in American cuisine. Maybe you\u2019d have heard of five-alarm chili if you\u2019d lived in Texas, but chances are you\u2019d never have actually eaten the stuff. If you\u2019re from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco sauce on your morning eggs. Aside from that, you wouldn\u2019t have tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an anthropologist would call a \u201cmen\u2019s mystery\u201d. Despite the existence of male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic cooking are indisputably a female thing \u2014 women are expected to be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who acquires skill is crossing into women\u2019s country. But for a handful of dishes culturally coded as \u201cmen\u2019s food\u201d, the reverse is true. Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot food went mainstream.<\/p>\n

For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being a marked minority taste to being something like a central men\u2019s mystery in the decade after 1985. I first realized this in the early 1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked meat. There\u2019s a sight you won\u2019t see at a flower show, or anywhere else in women\u2019s country.<\/p>\n

The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda\u2019s XXX (my favorite!) to novelty items like \u201cScorned Woman\u201d and \u201cHot Buns\u201d, much of the imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.<\/p>\n

Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the first place. It\u2019s considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter than you can handle. Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey, watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros <\/em>was passed repeatedly around the table.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sneaky element of female complicity in all this. Women chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it) \u201cWhat good is a man if you rip off his balls?\u201d They leave us capsaicin and barbecue and other men\u2019s mysteries because they instinctively grok that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is essential for the health of Y-chromosome types \u2014 and best it should be over something harmless.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “The capsaicinization of American food”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2002-11-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consider spicy-hot food \u2014 and consider how recent it is as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn\u2019t always that way. In fact it wasn\u2019t that way until quite recently, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[831,74,41,13],"tags":[262,1235],"class_list":["post-29563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-food","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-esr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7GP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34012,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29563\/revisions\/34012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}