It starts with a hundred tiny stinging needles, creeping from the tip of your tongue and across the roof of your mouth before hitting your throat with a burst of heat. It might fade quickly, leaving you with a pleasant tingling sensation. It might hit you so hard that your throat feels tight, your eyes water, and your nose starts to run. You may reach for a glass of ice water or rapidly inhale as much cooling air as possible. But what comes after is sublime.
Eating spicy food can be a delicious, exciting, even euphoric experience—and in that sensory roulette lies the allure of spiciness. Depending on your cultural background or proclivity toward masochism, spice may be unfamiliar, even shocking. But a love of heat is global, and perhaps counterintuitively, it burns most fiercely for people who live in the hottest places on earth. They are more likely to choose a piping hot chile-laden bowl of stew over a cold salad, and the reasons for that may sit at the intersection of history, geography, culture, and biology.
“The world cannot be conceived without capsicum,” says Maricel Presilla, PhD, a Cuban chef, historian, and cookbook author. Capsicum, the flowering nightshade and genus for chiles, originated in South America’s Amazonia region. It thrives in warm climates, is incredibly resilient, and can be eaten fresh, smoked, dried, or ground into powders. Many believe its seeds were first spread by birds, who don’t experience spiciness the way mammals do. The fruit was domesticated by Indigenous communities in the Americas, and European colonizers are credited for later dispersal across Africa, India, and Southeast Asia—places that boast some of the world’s spiciest food.
“Everywhere peppers landed, they had an extraordinary effect on society,” Presilla adds. “This small thing is flavor-changing.” While chiles themselves can be very tasty, spicy is not actually a flavor like sweet, salty, sour, bitter, or umami. Instead, it can amplify or round out flavors received by your tongue, an open secret understood by cooks around the world.
“It’s almost a travesty of justice not to cook with a heightened amount of spice,” Michelle Rousseau shares with me.
She and her sister, Suzanne Rousseau, are cookbook authors and owners of the celebrated pop-up bistro Journey to Summer in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Chiles are essential to Jamaican cuisine, and jerk, one of the island’s best known dishes of heavily spiced marinated meat (traditionally pork or chicken) grilled over open fire, is a cherry bomb of flavor. Redolent with allspice, thyme, garlic, and Scotch bonnet chiles, jerk is a journey. The smoky aroma primes your tongue for the herbs and spices, all supercharged by blazing hot chiles that open your senses and elevate the experience. And it’s a journey that starts at an early age for Jamaicans.
“You introduce new ingredients over time,” Suzanne says. “The pediatrician told me that, by the time children are a year, they should be able to eat out of the family pot.”
As I’ve studied tropical communities for my book, Islas, I’ve learned that the family pot—the one central dish that feeds the entire family—is an important survival strategy for those struggling with inequity, poverty, and limited access to healthy food. Spicy ingredients enhance lower-quality cuts of meat, making them more palatable. But there’s also a health benefit: Parents in these warm- weather climates train their children to enjoy spice to receive its antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties.
Nik Sharma is a cookbook author, chef, photographer, and molecular biologist from Mumbai, which is latitudinally proximal to Jamaica, with a similarly warm climate. He pointed to the prevalence of chiles and other spices in his home country and the scientific, cultural, and environmental reasons for eating hot food in hot places. Chiles have natural antimicrobial properties, so they’re used to preserve perishable ingredients—crucial in tropical climates where refrigeration has historically been a challenge. But spicy food also has a confounding yet helpful effect on the body.
“The hotter the food, especially with chiles, your body starts to perspire. And if you also combine that with the actual temperature, that phenomenon is amplified. So your body starts to sweat, and when your body sweats, it starts to cool off,” Sharma tells me. “It’s the natural mechanism to cool the body down.”
He hinted at a third factor: “It’s a way to experience a thrill without really hav-ing to risk your life. You’re in control.”
That thrill factor is, perhaps, what first attracted Paul Terry, PhD, to spicy food. He’s a chronic disease epidemiologist at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, and he’s what one might call a chile head: someone who can’t get enough of spicy food. He grew up in Queens, New York, and doesn’t come from a spicy food culture, so his first experience was at a Mexican restaurant. He remembers his mouth hurting, then the pain dissipating. He was hooked. “I found everything tasted better,” he shares. Today he grows jalapeños and habaneros in his garden; he and his teenage daughter, Mimi, have been known to add as many as 30 habaneros to a pan of mac and cheese. Both agree it’s delicious.
Terry recently wrote an article for Scientific American exploring whether or not spice, specifically capsaicin, which is the most concentrated form of heat found in chiles, is harmful to the body. In the end, he found no conclusive evidence. “If I put a hot match in my mouth and I feel heat, I’ve caused damage. But with capsaicin, it’s not the kind of damage that you’re imagining,” he explains. “It’s not quite the same thing as swallowing some hot coals, although it feels like it.”
So why, then, would anyone risk eating something that feels like an inferno? Here’s how chile heat works in the human body: Even though your tongue feels like it’s getting third-degree burns, it’s not actually seriously harmed (unless you eat a lot of them). The capsaicin in chiles is more of a messenger than a taste, producing a particular sensation when it binds to pain receptors in your nerves.
In Hurts So Good, author Leigh Cowart takes a stab at why humans choose to feel pain. As research for the book, they decided to try what is now the second hottest chile on earth, the Carolina Reaper, which they recommend if “you are the kind of person who wants to fight God and then feel like one.” Upon eating one, Cowart describes losing control of their senses—and then unimaginable, excruciating pain. But after their body recovered, the experience changed.
“When people talk about pain on purpose, they almost always talk about what comes next—how they feel after the pain. The endorphin rush, that hit of homebrew morphine, the lactic acid that makes the muscles tense with a pleasing burn long after the workout has ended,” Cowart writes. So while the first feeling is pain, the end is pleasure.
Our love of spicy food transcends culture and geography, but every chile head owes a debt to tropical communities. They harnessed the fiery fruit’s power to preserve ingredients (and improve on lesser quality ones), cool our bodies, and push us to our limits. Eating spicy food is a test of pain and endurance. On the other side can be pure bliss, not just sat- ing us but making us feel alive.
Von Diaz is a radio producer, food historian, documentarian, and cookbook author; her latest is ‘Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking.’