Some Like It Hot
T-POST® #190
Sold out!
Think about it: What makes a “man’s man”? Is it grit, brawns, resilience and casually installing gadgets without consulting the manual? Is the epitome of masculinity drinking smokey single malt whiskey, lifting heavy things and compulsively suppressing your emotions? Or maybe – just hear me out – manhood is entirely rated by how far you’ve travelled up the Scoville scale? We’ll get back to that last part.
The late Sean Locke, legendary British comedian, defined masculinity this way: “It doesn’t matter what the situation, what’s happened – you never flush twice. No. You just do what you gotta do, you flush once, and then you walk away. No regrets, no looking back, no trying to ‘sort out the situation’. That’s what a man’s man does.”
These days every dude and his grandpa seem to be a hot spiceconnoisseur.
Whether or not you agree with Mr. Locke on matters of fecal disposal, masculinity – or absence there of – has increasingly turned into a focal point of public discourse. After a couple of decades where toxic masculinity (deservingly) has been under heavy fire, online counterculture has started to seethe. Storybook-reading drag queens have been designated the most dangerous people on the planet, the “soy-boy weak modern man” is continuously mocked and ridiculed, and macho bros like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and conservative thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk have amassed huge online followings. The bros are fighting back.
Granted, the comforts of modern life have undoubtedly made us soft. In only a few generations we’ve gone from spending our short lives laboring in the woods for shelter, hunting for meat, working the fields for crops and battling the unforgiving weather – to ordering take out from our Ikea-couch while watching Yellowstone, arguing in comment sections, and taking Zoom-meetings in your underwear. But in this cozy bubble of modernity we’ve created, it’s like we all need something to make us feel something. We need to be uncomfortable, to struggle and feel pain, at least for a little while.
This might be where our rampant fascination for spicy food comes in. The sudden rise in passion for all things spicy is however not limited to males, nor is it indicative of political affiliation, but seems to have broken the barriers of gender, social status, age, and sexuality. We like it hot.
The Apple TV docuseries Omnivore, hosted by Danish chef and founder of three-star Michelin restaurant Noma, René Redzepi, confirms this suspicion.
Each one of the eight episodes focuses on one single key ingredient, and the way it’s shaped our history, our society and our future. We get a lengthy look at the story of tuna, salt, banana, pig, rice, coffee and corn. But the star of the very first episode is – you guessed it – chili. From paprika to ghost pepper, Redzepi takes us on a journey from the bright red strings of peppers lining the streets of a tiny Serbian village, to the Tabasco factory of Louisiana, on to the streets of Bangkok and back to the kitchen of Noma. It tells the tale of the Amazon – the birthplace of chili – and of how the potent seeds made its way across the world in the beaks of birds and bellies of boats. As Redzepi puts it: “In 1493 Columbus returned with tidings of the world, and a handful of chili seeds. In the 1500’s the Portuguese brought chili to the far east and changed food forever”. 500 years later Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman is on YouTube battling it out over who can stomach the spiciest chili. The Show “Hot Ones” invites some of the biggest stars on the planet for an interview while consuming chilies climbing the Scoville ladder.
And there have been some memorable guests on Hot Ones indeed. Aside from Deadpool and Wolverine, YouTube gold is forged when Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown does her best at answering questions while quickly spiraling out of control, ending up flipping the host Sean Evans off. Actress Halle Berry on the other hand is wildly impressive as she goes through hot wing after hot wing without batting an eye. Talk Show host Conan O’Brian stuffs half-eaten chicken wings in his pockets and attempts to appear unfazed as he claims “I don’t think there’s a wing here I can’t eat like it's ice cream while turning different shades of red. The YouTube-show is so iconic it even made the Apple TV+ series Loot, in which Maya Rudolph’s billionaire philanthropist character Molly does the challenge and ends up cursing out the host Sean Evans.
Well, I’m with Millie Bobby Brown on this one. The line between pleasure and pain might be thin, but so are the walls of my stomach and if I get an ulcer it’s going to be from too much Barolo and a constant anxiety over broken deadlines. Not chili.
Some may like it hot, but some of us are perfectly fine with lukewarm.
