“I would start off with scrambled eggs with Chorizo sausage with red chile sauce on it,” Dave DeWitt tells me. He’s 71 and balding, but when I meet him, his most distinguishable feature is his constant energy. It’s like he’s uncovered some great secret and must show everyone what truly is happening.
“For lunch I’d have a green chile cheeseburger. I’d have red chile enchiladas for dinner, and that would complete my chile pepper meal. Now, I don’t usually eat chile peppers every meal, but I do have something hot and spicy every single day. It’s a very pleasurable thing, and when you reach that level of pleasure you miss it when it’s gone. I can show you, in my pocket, I have a little canister of red chile powder so I can do that.” I don’t need to see the canister—I believe him.
Dave, once labeled the Pope of Peppers, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on chile peppers and spicy foods, a section of the food world he describes as the “fiery foods industry.” He has published 23 books on chile peppers and launched the Chile Pepper magazine, the National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show, and the Scovie Awards. Recently, after the Cornell Plantations declared 2015 to be the “Year of the Pepper,” he led several workshops and lectures on the history and use of chile peppers at the Plantations. Even his shirt is chile-based, emblazoned with chile peppers of varying colors across the Hawaiian-style fabric.
Dave has written about food for decades and he has had immense success as a chile-pepper expert. Here is a food product that has been constantly conquering popular cuisine decade after decade. Imagine Footloose, but replace dancing with the consumption of spicy food.
But doesn’t everyone love an underdog story? In this case, chile peppers were an underdog. Originally isolated to Mesoamerica, chile-pepper seeds were spread by birds across Florida, America, and Arizona. Portuguese and Spanish colonists, notably Columbus, further dispersed the range of peppers where they were adored en masse. Chile peppers moved further east in some inverted version of Manifest Destiny where they bettered everything they touched, whether it be Hungarian economy or Bangkok street food. Thanks to the spice trade between Pacific islands, chile peppers soon had circumnavigated the entire globe within a century of Western introduction.
Chile peppers have since climbed the leaderboards faster and stayed at the top longer than nearly any other exotic food item (see: the recent bubbles of cupcakes, kale, and, to a degree, bacon). “The bastions of blandness are going away, and chile peppers are taking over. I see no end in sight of it,” Dave tells the audience at his Cornell Plantations lecture.
Then he tells me, “We have this subtle infiltration of the whole American system.” That doesn’t sound like an interesting segment of food culture, that sounds like an alien invasion, a Communist overthrow, the seeds of a conspiracy. “Americans love the extreme: they love the fastest, the hottest, the most dangerous; that kinda stuff. And it sticks out.” That’s when it hit me: with chile peppers becoming so powerful, we needed a new underdog to move on to, to place our foodie interest in. I honestly believe this is why pickles are being reborn for the modern era. This triggered what I have dubbed “the Srirachaization of flavor.
Srirachaization (n.):
- the act of infiltrating and saturating a market or cuisine in a virus-like manner, akin to the development of Sriracha.
- the act of overusing a trendy food item, especially a spicy ingredient, in circumstances when the lack of that item would not have made a significant impact on a meal.
- the state of being Srirachaized (apply to any of the above definitions).
Some people are edging to extreme paranoia thanks to the popularity of chile peppers that Dave calls “capsisum madness.” In Ithaca, we are beginning to experience the Srirachaization of flavor as more and more of our meals become needlessly spicy for the sake of trendiness. Walk to the Commons and Mia’s calamari is drizzled with Sriracha. Head off towards Stewart Ave and your Banh Mi sandwich at Luna’s is topped with jalapeno, cilantro, and Sriracha mayo. Red’s once served me chicken and waffles with Sriracha-infused maple syrup, and then Waffle Frolic served me chicken and waffles with maple syrup-infused hot sauce. It’s spreading. And once you poison the well, how long will it take for that toxin to be flushed out of the supply?
Enter Kate Krader, Restaurant Editor at Food and Wine magazine and author of one of my favorite food essays, “Are Big Flavors Destroying the American Palate?” I first found the piece in Holly Hughes’ Best Food Writing 2014 and was mesmerized with the philosophical and futurist questions Krader raised in relation to chile peppers.
“When a dish isn’t laced with chiles or some kind of fermented paste or doused with vinegary sauce, I can pass it by,” Krader wrote in the article. “I’ve accepted the fact that I crave a hit of fire, acid or funk in my food. The question I’m working through: is this an evolution or a devolution?” It wasn’t until I found this article online that I saw the image that accompanied it: a massive, colorful, green chile cheeseburger. Dave’s favorite. No matter the details, The Pope of Peppers took offense when Krader began to wander into his fiery food backyard.
“Someone who’s so critical of chile peppers must have some innate fear of hot and spicy things,” he tells me, eyes wide. “Hot and spicy is not here to destroy taste buds. There’ve been many famous people, like Julia Child, who’ve said that chile peppers destroy taste buds. And she was being the Donald Trump of foods.”
Dave heads off into a tangent after this about the time he fought with Julia Child about the biology of taste bud replacement. “The point here is that chile peppers and spicy foods that are popular all over the world don’t destroy taste buds. It’s just another type of food people are liking. It’s not a fad, it’s not going away. … I go to other countries, and if the food is wonderful, I don’t add any chile peppers to it. I mean, I don’t destroy Italian food by slathering it with hot sauce. I don’t destroy French food by putting hot and spicy stuff on classic French dishes. There’s enough flavor in those dishes that you don’t really need chile peppers. Where you need chile peppers is how they got into the food system originally: spicing up potatoes, spicing up manioc, the most bland foods you can imagine. They need something!”
Dave is an optimist towards hot and spicy cuisine, and he has every right to be: he was a founding father of the industry. But his words seem almost quixotic at times. Krader brings her realist, questioning perspective to the table.
“As I debate whether my obsession with in-your-face flavors is a good thing or not, I consider the downside,” she wrotes. “Does everything I eat now taste to some degree like Sriracha? Have I lost the ability to appreciate the nuances in an elegant dish of sole in nasturtium broth? If a new Chinese restaurant isn’t using a lot of Sichuan peppercorns and shrimp paste, will I dismiss the cooking as boring? I think I can still appreciate delicate flavors, but there’s the strong possibility that I’ll try the nasturtium broth once and never again.”
When I talk about the Srirachaization of flavors destroying the American palette, or poisoning the well, this is what I’m talking about. Not, as Dave describes, explicitly ruining flavor by turning everything hot, but making “in-your-face flavors” the usual.
I fear this creates an unrealistic standard of food. Imagine you’re at a Thai place and you enjoy an extremely hot khanom chin nam ya, a delicious noodle dish. Next dinnertime you return to your local diner and are surprised, disappointed really, that what you’re eating isn’t all that hot. Nothing like the noodles. And so, like Krader predicted, you don’t try it again because it doesn’t give you that kick, that rush.
At this point I am no longer writing about chile peppers. Chile peppers, like sex, drugs, cars, video games, the Internet, and oil reserves, are just the vehicle to the same question people have been asking for centuries: when does a blessing become a curse? The answer—”when the blessing is taken in excess”—has always been the same, but the thing about excess is that it’s unmeasurable.
Dave claims that there is currently no environmental issue that could significantly hinder the growth of chile peppers. And I expect chile peppers to be added to more foods and for the Srirachaization of flavor to continue. Somewhere on this timeline, the blessing of chile peppers will become a curse, because they will become a new normal. And just like that, we will forget about them. Not because chile peppers will disappear, but because they’ll become integrated into our way of life.
Perhaps this is inevitable. If you had the option to better your food, to add pleasure to your meal, why not? Your neighbor will. Your friend will. Despite everyone being rational (just trying to have a good meal), they will not cooperate to lessen the Srirachaization even when it is in their best interests (to prevent an excess). This is known in game theory as the prisoner’s dilemma.
Krader ended her article with “Maybe, I thought, I’m becoming addicted to food with incredible texture. My evolution continues.” This evolution has been happening for millennia. At one point, humans were conquering the elements of form, temperature, and cooking techniques. In a way, we have ruined all of them by adopting them; we have turned them all into excess thanks to thousands of prisoner’s dilemmas. Texture, thanks to modernist cooking and the introduction of molecular gastronomy, is rising about the trends of hot and spicy foods. We will ruin texture too.
As genetic engineering develops, food will become one of the first items we modify. We wouldn’t start with creating whole new foods, but shifting the flavors of already made ones. I have no idea if there is an institution that would be able to limit or regulate such products. Forget designer babies, soon we will have designer flavors. What’s stopping someone from producing a beet that tastes fifty times better? Or a cacao variety better than anything ever imagined? If the current evolution of trendy elements of food (the order of development being: lowly origin, adoption by foodies, prisoner’s dilemma of Srirachaization, pleasure, normalization) continues, and if Dave’s statement on going back to bland is unlikely, I predict that we will create heaven and then consume it. Cuisine could have evolved a billion different ways if not for this evolutionary track. But that’s fine. Humans have always been ingenious people, and there will always be new niches of food to explore. Our evolution continues.
I seem to be forgetting that this article isn’t about politics, genetic engineering, global citizenship, economics of scarcity, philosophy, or game theory. It is about an idiosyncratic, balding man who can comfort kids with gardening facts just as well as he can ramble about green chile cheeseburgers for half an hour. He cannot stand idly by as the world turns and people take sides; it is up to the Pope to decide the excommunication of a person on idea. Dave is no mere man, he is the Pope of Peppers, and it is his duty and honor to comment on these big ideas because no one else has his power.
In an interview about her article, Krader said that “Here in New York City, a bunch of French restaurants have been opening recently. It’s the trend here. It’s a return to a little more subdued cooking. I have to say I’m not freaking out. I feel maybe my palate is evolving and I’m coming back to quieter flavors.” This evolution Krader, Dave, and I speak of has not been perfectly charted. Things may begin to cool off, to return to their roots. Either way, our tastes are secure. Take comfort in sitting at the dinner table at night with a Tupperware of leftovers next to you at a bottle of Tabasco and knowing that, however food evolves, it’s going to be delicious. It’s going to be comfort food.