The Devil's Dinner

August 13, 2018
In this ruminative history, Walton (In the Realm of the Senses) traces the evolution of chili peppers. He first lays out a taxonomy of some of the 50,000 pepper varieties—ranging from the tears of fire, which will “make you weep ardently” and is measured at 30,000 Scoville heat units (SHUs indicate how pungent food is—Tabasco sauce is a modest 2,500 SHUs) to the mysterious megahot “Pepper X,” with three million SHUs. He tracks how chilis “poured forth” from the Americas after Columbus, following slave trade routes through Africa and into Asia, bringing fire to Indian and Chinese cooking (he writes that Mao was “as sworn to hot chilies as he was to revolutionary strategy”). Walton then turns his attention to the strange attractions of today’s competitive hot-chili-eating culture, noting that its “sheer gratuitousness” feels “specifically male.” He explains that even though the burning sensation caused by eating chili peppers developed as an evolutionary defense mechanism, that hasn’t stopped them from becoming a critical culinary and symbolic focal point of human society, “a triumph of alimentary defiance over biological instinct.” This is a fascinating overview of the cultural and culinary changes wrought by a fiery little fruit “that was only telling human beings that it didn’t want to be eaten.”