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Comment by evnix | Hacker News Reader

shouldn't it be most humans? China and India and most of asia have chilli peppers and so does africa. It is the minority that cannot tolerate chillies.

prior to chillies, black pepper, ginger and garlic was used and if used in appropriate quantities gives you a similar result. chillies are just a lot more economical to grow.

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I live in the Indian subcontinent. As long as I can remember, I have HIGHLY DISLIKED eating spicy food to a point when my sibling and I were kids, there used to be 2 dishes for lunch/dinner, one for the adults and one for kids. This is VERY unusual in our culture because kids are, out of this "practice of cooking 2 dishes" that parents train their kids to "eat chilli" from when they are very young. They are "trained" from a young age.

I probably had that done to me and they realized, "ah shucks. Let it be" and here I am today.

I take milk with my dinner when the food is spicy because that has always helped me.

The problem is, I am often ridiculed for not ensuring the spice of red chilli.

The day before, my parents "challenged" me to eat dinner without chilli for a month because according to them, "our body wants chilli". Mine doesn't.

edit: just to clarify, our spice cabinet in our home is an absolute monster, we have dozens of common and exotic spices which we use "on a daily basis" so even highly spicy food isn't the problem for me. "red chilli" in particular is troubling.

Maybe you have an allergy? For all of my life, I absolutely hated shrimp. Even smelling it from across a room would make me want to vomit. Then when I was in my mid-20's, I developed an allergy to crabs (which previously I loved) and I realized that reaction was the same I'd had to shrimp all those years.

uh, not "allergy" levels. i dont get anything troubling.

i mean when i have food with lots of red chilli, i feel like i "dont want to stand the burning sensation". most people have a higher tolerance than me but i would prefer if it werent testing my tolerance.

its not like i cant or wont eat food with boatloads of red chilli....

i have a relative who takes red chilli powder, mixes some water and takes that with plain rice. that's "comfort food" for him, not for me...

pick a chilli from a plant and eat it like how an animal would do in the wild. you'll want to jump into a pond after that. The chilli plant evolved in such a way that humans don't like chilli pepper. Humans used cooking and drying and diluting and other modern methods to reduce the ill-effects of spices and enjoy its flavors in small quantities.

I occasionally have them raw in salads, though more often pickled (still technically raw I suppose). Chopped up and cooked in something too of course. I don't think that's unusual of me.

But would you eat chilli peppers like how you'd eat other fruits and veggies? Say tomatoes or beets. No. ofcourse not.

I eat raw but pickled chillies far more frequently than raw tomatoes. (I never eat raw beetroot so I'll leave that, though I'm surprised people do. Or are 'beets' not beetroot?)

I eat raw and not even pickled chillies in salads or on the side of a plate of other food at least as much as tomatoes the same way.

More often pickled, but that's largely for convenience, in no small part for extra vinegary flavour, and not really at all to make them more mild.

But I already said that above and you clearly don't believe me. I don't think it's uncommon either, fwiw, I'm not at all claiming to be unique or anything like it.

Yeah some people do, in asian cultures it's not uncommon. Actually they eat it more like an apple than a beet.

It was my grandma favorite snack. The hotter the better.

Conditioning is very powerful.

I don't know what you mean. Raw chillis are commonly served in this area (Eastern Europe) together with soups, just like raw onions, for example.

However, I've never seen anyone eat a raw beetroot. And of course, people don't put tomatoes in fruit salads, as the old saying goes - different fruit are eaten in different ways.

Raw beetroot is actually a great salad vegetable. We have it grated sometimes. Some can be a little earthy and have a bit of heat like radish or ginger.

Had raw grated beetroot in my salad today for lunch, and very tasty it was too. I pulled it out of the ground five weeks ago, weighed 1.4kg - it's the purple-and-white stripey version, makes the salad quite colourful. Been cutting bits off it to grate every time I have a salad. For some reason, beetroot seems to keep extremely well in the fridge.

Best to do when fresh. Most when store bought are a few months old they are a lot tougher and harder to digest.

Oh, I started when it was fresh. It takes a while to munch through a 1.4kg root. And it actually seems to be remarkably unaffected by time, so far. Probably only a couple more salads left in it now.

When I was a kid we use to eat them by plucking them from a tree, dipping them in salt, and then devouring them. It was just something people did.

Well you don't eat potatoes raw do you? Nor do you eat an eggplant raw and many others. I don't understand the argument here

Raw potatoes are risky because of toxins that can be present.

Eggplant and potato are aren’t fruits. Chiles are fruits, and most edible fruits are eaten raw.

Eggplants are fruits, in biology definition

Yes I do, and most Koreans do too.

We dip raw peppers into a hot pepper sauce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-bwUP77ElM

> But would you eat chilli peppers like how you'd eat other fruits and veggies? Say tomatoes or beets. No. ofcourse not.

Yes, of course I do. What point do you think you're making?

There's a huge range of "chili peppers", and the cultures where these are popular all refer to them by their individual names. see https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/chili-pepper-types/

It's not just varying levels of hot-ness that distinguishes them but a wide variety of flavor profiles and preparation techniques that enhance those flavors. Some peppers can absolutely be eaten raw and with seeds, others do well with drying and roasting prior to use, others are hot no matter how you prepare them and even if you remove the seeds.

I think the actual heat that folks react to is mostly just an acquired taste and NOT something that's been programmed in by evolution to keep humans from eating these things. You can get used to rather hot peppers, but even if you don't there's many which have a low-enough scoville number (in the 10000's), that the heat is controllable by using less and one can still enjoy the other aspects of pepper's flavor.

>The seeds of Capsicum plants are dispersed predominantly by birds. In birds, the TRPV1 channel does not respond to capsaicin or related chemicals (avian vs. mammalian TRPV1 show functional diversity and selective sensitivity). This is advantageous to the plant, as chili pepper seeds consumed by birds pass through the digestive tract and can germinate later, whereas mammals have molar teeth which destroy such seeds and prevent them from germinating. Thus, natural selection may have led to increasing capsaicin production because it makes the plant less likely to be eaten by animals that do not help it disperse.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin

Raw jalepenos are not uncommon, I've eaten them often, including served that way in restaurants. Red chillis sometimes too, though not as much.

If you let your jalapeños get red, they'll be hotter and tastier.

It's common in Asia to be served raw hot chillis as a garnish for whatever you've ordered. I've had probably at least a couple hundred of such meals in Singapore.

It's just harvest season for my chili's and I eat all of them fresh.

Also the majority of chili plants aren't actually that spicy.

> The chilli plant evolved in such a way that humans don't like chilli pepper.

The hottest chilli cultivars were deliberately bread because humans like them.

Yes, but it's worth keeping in mind that everything that we call a chilli was selectively bred, and is quite different from the wild rootstock. Chiltepins [1], which is thought to be quite close to the wild variant, is much hotter than most commercial chillis today, although not up there with the hottest.

[1] https://www.nativeseeds.org/collections/chiltepines -- recommended, always have some in my pantry.

what? people eat and garnish food with raw chilis all the time.

If anything, processes like pickling can bring even more heat out of a pepper

What's interesting is that even among cultures that eat very spicy food, some absolutely cannot tolerate it. I have a friend from Chengdu and some friends in Malaysia who cannot eat anything spicy. It makes it hard for them to eat food outside and they've had to learn by trial and error the restaurants that can actually limit the amount of spiciness.

I've found that my tolerance for spicy depends entirely on the spice. Chili peppers? Intolerable to me. Even "mild" dishes are too uncomfortable, and anything spicier is impossible for me to eat.

On the other hand, horseradish or wasabi is no problem even in high concentrations. Black pepper is no problem as well.

It seems to me that there must be a biochemical reason for the differences.

Sichuan pepper too; widely used across east Asia for a long time.

? It was imported from the new world around 1700 so 300 years.. not really a long time, just as new as the us.

Sichuan peppercorns, not chili peppers. Although I don't know why gp provided them as an example. They aren't the slightest bit hot, they just have a tingly numbing sensation and a nice flavor.

ginger, black pepper or long pepper could be a better example

Sichuan pepper is native to Asia and is a citrus species. it is an old world plant.

Sichuan Peppercorn is not a new world chili, and is endemic to Asia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanthoxylum_armatum

Why do people refer to it as new / old world when it's been around and inhabited since forever? It's a weird misnomer, just like calling its inhabitants Indians, and just like calling countries 3rd world.

Its pretty universal though, all people have preconceptions like that. Like chinese tourists, calling home the mainland and the inhabitants of the visited country "foreigners". Its more prevalent in huge countries or ex empires though. Super annoying when your country is small and you have to adapt to these wrong pre conceptions because the other side gets insulted, if you call them "just another country among many".

Can't tolerate? The world champions in chili eating contests are caucasian.

That might be because the competition is held in the US? I don’t know.

I think that's less tolerance for spices and more just white guys being into weird frat house style competitions. I mean can you imagine a black Jackass

world star

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