Reaper pepper11/8/2023 ![]() ![]() A relative newcomer to the scene, he burst onto the international pepper-eating circuit with his win at Ed Currie’s Inaugural International Pepper-Eating Contest held a month ago. She tells me that rumor has it that her opponent today, Dustin “the Atomik Menace” Johnson, doesn’t feel pain in his mouth from chili peppers. The Atomik Menace didn’t get his name because he’s a big dude he got it downing superhots. Sir, this is a chili-eating competition, not a football game. It’s something American cis men love to do, act like smallness inherently brings with it a competitive disadvantage, even if that competition has nothing to do with stature. ![]() All the announcers today will comment on her small stature, as if her lack of bearishness would put her at a disadvantage in this battle of wills. ![]() Shahina, one of the headliners for today’s main event, sits across from me. ![]() In fact, some of the most highly ranked pepper eaters on the planet. Shahina and I are chatting in a small, stand-alone structure on the California state fairgrounds surrounded by volunteers looking for their orders and musicians hiding from the sun, an array of single-serving chip bags, wet beers from the ice tub, and pepper eaters. But then you think, ‘Well, I’d much rather have that than, like, twelve hours of being on the floor, hunkered up, crying and screaming in agony.’” It’s like being stabbed multiple times, and it’s the worst feeling.” After that, she says, she learned her lesson. “You can’t get up, you’re literally on the floor like palms up, you’re begging, and you get cold sweats, hot sweats, everything, and you’re literally begging for death.” She looks me in the eye, serious as the hell she’s describing. She tells me that out of the 71 hot-pepper-eating competitions she’s entered, she has failed to throw up afterward 11 times, which meant that she got the dreaded cap cramps: gastric distress caused by capsaicin in the GI tract. “If you keep them in, no matter what you do, you’re going to have, like, the worst night of your life,” says the UK Chili Queen, Shahina Waseem. I guess I am as ready as I could possibly be.īut I did not bring beer or a milkshake or anything that might uncouple the capsaicin molecules from the receptors in my mouth. I’ve spoken with world-class hot pepper eaters, read stacks of scientific papers about capsaicin, know that dairy and alcohol can be used to soothe the pain that is coming. I’ve read countless essays about what it’s like to eat the hottest pepper in the world, watched a guy on YouTube smoke one in his bong, flipped through episodes of Hot Ones, where celebrities like Idris Elba and Paul Rudd choke down molten-hot chicken wings while being interviewed and weeping. I know that this pepper is hot: I know its Scoville heat unit score (2.2 million, or roughly 600 times hotter than a single jalapeño pepper), and I know what it is going to do to me (very bad things). I know who grew it: Greg Foster, who holds the world record for most Reaper peppers eaten in one minute (120 grams, which came out to sixteen peppers, if you want to give it a shot). I’ve taken mushrooms on purpose, and I’ve taken mushrooms not on purpose, and I must say, I treated the humble object carrying the experience within it with much more reverence when I knew of its Precious Cargo. The potential of a thing, radiating outward from it at a frequency only heard by those with ears tuned to its call. Looking at it, I feel the same way as when I hold a tab of acid or a test tube of particularly virulent Pseudomonas or a superlatively mean plastic flogger. It’s a wonder, this, the hottest pepper in the world: its green stem between my fingers, its body having all the innocuity of a strawberry, with which it shares both size and hue. I’m stalling even now, even writing this, somewhat reticent to fully revisit the sadistic contours of the Carolina Reaper pepper experience I was about to bite into. I’m stalling with repeated takes, chipperly talking to my phone over and over, wedging it this way and that in the steering wheel. This feels ominous, appropriate, given the journey I’m about to blast off on. (I’m scared.) The seats are deep and dark, and all the lights shining through the icons on the dash are red, making me feel like I am in a spaceship. I’m recording the preamble to my pepper-eating video over and over again, the insides of my lungs thrumming with excitement. There’s a cold bottle of water sweating in the cup holder, a one-use relic of end-stage capitalism that will outlast us all. Parked in the dusty lot of the county fairgrounds in Auburn, California, I’m in the driver’s seat of a rental car, hands imperceptibly trembling. Reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. From Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart, copyright © 2021. ![]()
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