Chilli enthusiasm is increasing in the United States, with more than half of respondents likelier to buy items described as spicy, up from 39% in 2015. The trend has spread to the UK, visible in hot sauce shops, extensive home collections, and small-batch snack products. Capsaicin produces an endorphin buzz but cultural factors, social signaling, and palate-seeking drive greater adoption. Media influences such as the YouTube show Hot Ones amplify visibility. Palate fatigue from abundant global flavors leads consumers to seek more intense stimulation. Spice can humble all eaters, as seen in a Paris restaurant choosing level three.
The US is, according to the Atlantic, which recently explored the country's growing enthusiasm for hot stuff (more than half of Americans in a survey said they were likely to buy an item described as spicy, up from 39% in 2015) and killer chillies. Americans have certainly thrown themselves into it I spent an entertaining hour in a Brooklyn hot sauce emporium last year having tasting profiles of various skull-emblazoned, jokily named bottles earnestly sauce-splained to me by mulleted men
Capsaicin, the active component of chilli peppers, supposedly delivers an endorphin buzz, but it's surely more cultural than physiological. We're all global culinary sophisticates these days no one wants to admit to being the kind of wimp who craves flavourless white people food. Chilli's expanding geographic penetration has probably been helped along by Hot Ones, the YouTube show where celebrities writhe as they submit to ever-spicier chicken wings; Demi Moore's steely, unbothered performance on it merited many Oscars.
But whether you're a Carolina Reaper eater or intimidated by red Doritos, everyone gets a chilli humbling eventually. Mine came, humiliatingly, in Paris this spring. Choose a spice level from one to five, the waiter in a Laotian restaurant said. Five is really hot. Three is quite spicy. Judging myself reasonably robust, and French people chilli-averse, (I should have read Alexander Hurst's exploration of the new French appreciation for hot stuff last year), I went with three
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