More Americans are setting their mouth on fire -- for extreme sport, and for everyday thrills.
The Carolina Reaper is so hot, it makes jalapeños taste like milk. It's so hot, it causes people to hallucinate, vomit, pass out, wish they'd never been born. It's so hot that the guy who invented it -- in 2012, by crossbreeding habaneros and Naga Viper peppers, each of which were once thought to be the hottest in the world -- has said it tastes like eating "molten lava." Original-recipe Tabasco sauce is up to 5,000 Scoville heat units; habaneros are up to 350,000. The Reaper has been known to reach 2.2 million.
To be clear, I have never tried it -- none of the above sounds that fun to me. But you are welcome to. You can have it dusted onto cheese curls sold at your local grocery store, or on a slider at one of the more than 300 Dave's Hot Chicken locations nationwide, so long as you sign a waiver. I can't get over this: 15 years ago, our species could not imagine a pepper as hot as the Reaper, and now we can eat it with a lemonade and fries for lunch before heading back to the office.
America is setting its mouth on fire. According to an analysis provided to me by Datassential, a food-and-beverage-industry consultancy, more than half of American consumers are likely to buy an item described as spicy, up from 39 percent in 2015. Those who already like spice are eating even more extreme versions of it, but the interest in heat is happening across the board, even at the moderate level, among people who might never touch a Carolina Reaper. As of this year, more than 19 out of every 20 restaurants in the United States -- a category that, notably, includes ice-cream stores, bakeries, and coffee shops -- offer at least one spicy item, according to Datassential. Frito-Lay now sells 26 different Flamin' Hot products, and sales of those products increased by 31 percent from 2022 to 2023.
Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich
To put it generally and reductively, American food has not always been known for embracing spice. But now a large and apparently growing number of people in this country are willingly chomping down on fruits that have been expressly cultivated to bind to their body's pain receptors and unleash fury with every bite. "It's one of the great puzzles of culinary history," Paul Rozin, a retired psychologist who spent much of his career studying spice, told me. "It is remarkable that something that tastes so bad is so popular."
This trend, like basically every trend, is being driven by young people: According to a survey by NCSolutions, which helps packaged-food companies advertise, 51 percent of Generation Z consider themselves hot-sauce connoisseurs, and 35 percent have signed a waiver before eating something spicy. But it is also the result of a collision of several changes in the way Americans eat. Food costs are high, and the industry is crowded; spice can be a cheap way to produce flavor, get consumer attention, and mask less-expensive ingredients such as corn and chicken. New techniques have enabled manufacturers to tweak flavors much more easily, injecting spice into just about any mass-produced food: ice cream, lemonade, Gushers, boxed mac and cheese, the sandwich bread at Subway.
Immigration, the internet, cheap shipping, and inexpensive international travel have ushered in a truly global food era, one in which people are much more familiar with, and able to access, ingredients and ideas from the heat-seeking culinary traditions common in Asia and Central America. And at the same time, spicy food has also gotten better, moving away from the blunt-force trauma of what Dylan Keenan, who runs the online hot-sauce store Heat, described to me as "stupid hot stuff that didn't taste good" in favor of more nuanced flavors: the back-of-the-throat burn of the Trinidad Scorpion, the lip-numbing kick of Sichuan peppercorns. The Reaper, despite sounding intense, still tastes more interesting than the pepper extract that used to supercharge hot sauces and snack foods; it's sweet and a little fruity, supposedly, at least before the pain sets in. All told, spicy food is easier to make, easier to find, and easier to love than it was just a few decades ago.
The body's spice receptors adapt over time, like feet get calluses. So spice creep is ceaseless and self-perpetuating: We're getting used to spicier foods, so we are eating spicier foods, so we are getting even more used to even spicier foods, as though our taste buds are all on a flywheel that can't stop speeding up. In 2022, responding to customer demand, Fly By Jing introduced an even hotter version of its Sichuan chili crisp, made with what its founder, Jing Gao, described to me as "the hottest Chinese chili you can grow." (Xtra Spicy is now the company's second-best seller, behind its original recipe.) At Heat, Keenan told me, sales of extra-hot sauces are growing faster than milder ones, and What's the hottest thing that still tastes good? is the most common customer request. "I do think it's likely that within a generation or two," he wrote to me in an email, "the median American will be able to handle spice levels that would have sent a medieval peasant into anaphylactic shock." Historically speaking, he pointed out, spice tolerance has only moved in one direction.
It's true. The first person to eat a hot pepper probably did it somewhere in the lowlands of southern Mexico more than 10,000 years ago, and I would guess they probably thought it would kill them. But they went back for more, or at least they told their friends. Part of this is pure neurochemistry: Capsaicin, the compound that makes many spicy foods spicy, transmits pain signals to the brain, which the brain then counteracts by releasing endorphins -- it's like a runner's high, except you can get it while sitting in your car outside of a McDonald's. Rozin calls the phenomenon "benign masochism": a little bit of pain, as a treat. "It's bungee jumping and roller coasters and swimming in cold water," he said, and it is a uniquely human impulse. (Imagine what would happen if you put a dog on a roller coaster.) "We somehow get a pleasure out of our body telling us not to do something, but we know it's okay." In the 1970s, when he was studying spice in Oaxaca, Rozin found that even children had learned to tolerate spice. When he offered the local pigs and dogs a choice, they picked bland food every time.
Read: What your favorite grocery store says about you
The dogs might be onto something. Then again, they don't know about viral food challenges, or about the idea that your food choices reflect your identity, or how powerful it can feel to confront agony and swallow it whole. Mao Zedong is said to have suggested that anyone who couldn't tolerate chiles couldn't be a revolutionary; all over the world, and for centuries, spiciness has been something to conquer, and chiles have symbolized strength, bravery, national pride, and virility. America, it seems, is finally catching up. Self-taught superhot cultivators have spent the past decade trying to outdo themselves, crossbreeding progressively more infernal peppers with progressively more ridiculous names, ones like Death Spiral and Dragon's Breath. (The Reaper isn't even the world's hottest anymore: That would be Pepper X, which has an average Scoville rating of above 2.6 million.) Rich and famous people with much, much better things to do are willingly humiliating themselves on Hot Ones, a web show that invites celebrities to eat hot wings while answering interview questions and that sold last year for $82.5 million. Internet-facilitated food challenges have become both more common and more extreme.
The extreme has, as it tends to do, seeped into everyday life. Blandness has become not just a culinary flaw but a moral failing, evidence of spinelessness and unsophistication. Being able to withstand spicy food, by contrast, is probably the most meaningless matter of personal preference people feel comfortable bragging about. (Think about it: Beyoncé would never sing about keeping ketchup in her bag.) The whole thing does feel very human: The impulse to defeat nature and find ever more extraordinary ways to test the limits of having a body, even if (especially if) it hurts a little. So we swill milk and cry in front of an audience of millions, or battle against our own biology at breakfast -- just for the thrill, just because we can.