Do Colder or Warmer Places Eat More Spicy or Bland Food?

This article seems to conflate "spice ingredients" with spicy ingredients. I would have a hard time considering how food from cuisines that use (e.g.) aniseed, caraway, cardamom or poppy seed could be considered "spicy food".

What a bizarre classification: unusually specific in some instances, and enormously vague in others - Mughlai vs. South Indian. South Indian food contains a lot of variety - from coastal Andhra, to Chettinad style, to Kerala food, Mysore, Udupi cuisine, and Hyderabad-style, all have varied levels of spices, some South Indian cuisine is spicier than Rajasthani cuisine, for sure.

But on a more pertinent note - it may be something historical - you need to spice up the food a little to disguise slightly stale food. Historically, a lot of the present spices like black pepper, cardamom and cinnamon also came from places like Kerala, Sri Lanka and Malaysia which were very close to the equator. No wonder it affected the food there.

The article seems to ignore the fact that people eat what grows locally.

So, India grows a lot of spices, hence the food has those as ingredients.

Norway doesn’t, so food is bland.

That’s my theory anyway..

Spices evolved to grow in warmer climates , go figure

This analysis is crap.

My family origin is Pahari farmers. In winters, my ancestral town's temperatures fall below freezing, yet Chili Powder from our region is a staple in most North Indian cooking (Kashmiri Mirch grown in JK and Himachal).

That Punjab and Mughlai trendline can be attributed to that reason - Kashmiri Mirch is a staple in both styles of cooking now, but if you look at "pind style" cooking, it's way less spicy. A traditional Kadhi, Saag, or Choley isn't going to be spicy but might have 1 Kashmiri Mirch added as a garnish.

Peppers only came to our portion of the Himalayas in the 18th and 19th century (hence why Bell Peppers are called "Shimla Mirch" - it was brought by the Brits), but became a popular commodity to sell due to high margins and easy to grow in small plots, which is important in JK and Himachal as land reform laws capped agricultural plots to 3 acres at most.

Also treating "South Indian" as a single cuisine group is a travesty.

>North USA

>South USA

This isn't a thing, and reminds me how 'steamed hams' is also a regional food. They're making up stuff and going along with whatever just to get clicks.

Original paper: There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk

Original paper's conclusion: ...not explained by temperature and that spice use cannot be accounted for by diversity of cultures, plants, crops or naturally occurring spices. Patterns of spice use are not consistent with an infection-mitigation mechanism, but are part of a broader association between spice, health, and poverty.

I wonder how they chose which countries to include in the graph. A lot of my family's Venezuelan and have 0 spice tolerance whatsoever despite growing up near the equator.

They also seem to be ranking things per recipe rather than per unit of food eaten by the population, if you read the abstract. Even if there are 9 spicy recipes and 1 bland recipe in a country, if the 1 bland recipe is eaten every day, doesn't that just show that there are more spicy varieties of dishes?

Still an interesting article regardless.

The explanation that I was working with was that in hotter climates food spoils faster so spiciness can slow or mask the process. The article says:

> The researchers suggest other explanations for why people in hot countries tend to eat spicier food. One possibility is that it’s because spices help preserve food in hot climates. Another is that people in hot countries have developed a taste for spicy food because it helps them cool down.

TLDR: Don't trust this paper as meaningful, it's meant only as a tentative step towards something which may be meaningful.

They put Alabama and New Mexico in the same category? Even when the latter has "red or green [chile]" as the official state question, and has a very different environment due to being in the high desert?

And all of South Africa into a single category? The supplementary materials say "For South Africa in the B&S dataset1, the cookbooks from which the recipes were derived are written by Afrikaans-speaking authors8, so we have used the Afrikaans language to represent this cuisine." but that is only one of many cultures in South Africa, including a large Indian population with spicy food.

This makes me regard the paper with a wary eye.

Ohhh! All of the peer reviews are published! See "Peer Review Information" at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01039-8 . It took a while to get this paper through, with lots of comments about issues.

Reviewer #1, after giving the okay, points out:

"I am aware this was a limitation of the sources upon which the study relied, and that similar biases were present in previous work, and this does not undermine the study overall because it is a “tenative step” towards better understanding, but please make this a very clear and strong caveat in the discussion and conclusions. It may also be leading to the rather odd correlation between GDP and spiciness which I refer to above."

where that correlation above is:

"the rather limited global sampling (see below) may also be playing a role here. For example, off the cuff, adding in say Singapore (which I imagine might have spicy food and be rich) and Nicaragua (which has rather bland food but is poor) could make a difference…I would not suggest the authors try to expand their sample (unless very straightfoward), but please at least discuss this possibility."

Countries that had better preservation methods and safer ways of consuming meat didn't rely on spices.

Northern Asia, Europe

Yes