Why Is Everything Spicy Now?

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.

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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.”

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