Nicks - Hot Sauce Nation: Americas Burning Obsession

A s always and above all I am grateful to the people too numerous to name here whose generosity with their time, their stories, and their hot sauce made this work possible. Not all of them made it into these pages, but all contributed to this project and I cannot thank them enough.

Yuval Taylor is a wise guide and the best kind of editor, one who makes the work not just better but a better version of itself. My friend, confidant, and frequent coconspirator Jim Fitzgerald, who is also my agent, was instrumental as always and in myriad ways at all points of this project. I am hopeless without the help of many individuals, but I am especially indebted to my culture guru Greg Hermann, my journalism consigliere Jay Newton-Small, my chief literary consultant Kaira Casey, and my senior snacks adviser the itinerant Aric S. Queen. I am also indebted to the many friends and strangers who directed me to various hot saucerelated stories and happenings, and to my transcriptionist Gail Morrison.

I depend on friends and family to keep a roof over my head while on the road and to stay reasonably sane. Tremendous thanks to Dianna Knost, Drew Baker, Garett Neudeck, Richard Weening, Victoria Leslie, David Nicks, Travis and Constance Nicks, Savannah Nicks, Spencer Livingston-Gainey, Joshua Murl Jones, Clay Dillow, Julie Niemi, Arlet Siordia, Josh and Bailey Czupryk, Matthew Bengloff, Suzette Matthews, Eustace Harold Winn IV, Mitchell and Allison London, Keith Kobylka, Synthia Link, Tyler Fields, Natty Adams, Andrea Leitch, Don and Antonia, Amy Clovis, Todd Rose, Garett Haake, Sara Murray, and Shiner.

Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humanslanguage, rationality, culture, and so on. Id stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

DR. PAUL BLOOM, HOW PLEASURE WORKS

M y dad lost his sense of taste while I was growing up. It happened gradually, as his allergies and malformed nasal cavity conspired over the years to strangle his sense of smell. That knocked the legs right out from under his ability to perceive flavor. Determined to get something out of his meals, hed drench them in the only thing he could almost taste: Tabasco hot sauce. Hed use more of it every year, and after a while the stuff was everywhere in our home, an omnipresent condiment at family meals, which seemed to get spicier by the year too. My mom is a brilliant and industrious woman, but I wouldnt trust her with a can of SpaghettiOs; dad was the cook in our family.

Not many consumer products resonate through my childhood memories as strongly as Tabasco, that smoky, tangy red fireball packed into a tiny clear bottle. It reminds me of dad (who eventually had nasal surgery and regained his sense of taste but has never lost his love for heat) and his wild marathon cooking sessions, chopping up a spicy storm in our hectic kitchen; the ceremony of adding the final, personal touch to a nearly complete dish and the rite of passage in growing old enough to actually enjoy it; the time my best friend introduced me to the holy trinity of macaroni, cheese, and hot sauce; or the time I told my little brother that Tabasco was a kind of candy. He guzzled all the shots of it he could before it dawned on him that this was not candy, his mouth was on fire, and his brother was an asshole.

Its no accident that hot sauce looms so large in the nostalgic corner of my brain. From among all of our senses both smell and taste are capable of producing some of our clearest and most poignant memories. But, as you know if youve ever poured too heartily from the wrong bottle of hot sauce, taste and smell are but secondary pieces of the hot sauce puzzle. Theres something else happening with hot sauce unique to the chilies that are its essential ingredient, something weirder and kinkier and a stubborn mystery that cuts to the heart of what it means to be humanpain.

Its said he was a brave man who first ate an oyster. But what about the second man to eat a chili? Braver yet, Id say. Eating an oyster is a bold proposition indeed, and far be it from me to disparage the mettle of that industrious and no doubt very hungry person, but the queer-looking clam is, in the end, a pretty innocuous mark. It tastes either good or bad before it slithers down the gullet, and thats about the end of it.

Now picture the scene before our curious prehistoric foodie, chilihead zero. HeIm assuming a he, though it certainly might have been a she; in any event she or he was probably an adolescent, owing to the not insignificant amount of reckless jackassery necessary for this sort of operationwatches a buddy pick a little berry from a bush. Its small and colorful. Its even cute. The two teenagerswell call them Dorg and Craghave seen birds eating the berries, so they figure said berries cant be too bad for them. Dorg pops one into his mouth and bites down. His eyes widen as he gapes at Crag with bewildered terror. He spits out the demon plant, but its too late. His face reddens as he paces, clutching his cheeks and hair, sucking in cool air, and calling for water, which doesnt, once it arrives, help much. The fire in Dorgs mouth seems only to grow as tears pour involuntarily from his eye sockets and snot drips from his nostrils. Until finally, as if by magic, the fire disappears as mysteriously as it arrived, having burned nothing at all.

Damn, Dorg. Pass me one of those, Crag says.

Crag is no coward. We can at least give him that.

The adventures of Dorg and Crag raise a question: Why would Crag say that? And more to the point (since you can envision some kind of idiotic dare scenario that might have forced both their hands on the first round) once both Dorg and Crag had eaten the demon berry, the episode raises a deeper, more interesting question: Why do it again?

What Dorg and Crag experienced was pain, an evolved sensation buried so deep in our cells, our selves, that it is inextricably linked with what it is to be an animal. Try spiritual exuberance, illegal drugs, the funniest joke you ever heard, and even orgasmic ecstasy, and I promise that for sheer clarity of the sensation and force of the moment none will compare to driving a nail through your foot. You can feel pain as a slap in the face or the slow degrading of your joints or the agony of lost love, and each will, to one degree or another, affect you at a level both physical and emotional, and perhaps even spiritual. We can feel pain at a depth and to a degree that we simply cannot feel pleasureunless, of course, the pleasure is the pain, which points toward the essence of our story. You could say pain is where the body meets the soul.