Why We Love the Pain of Spicy Food
1st January 2015
Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in our taste for heat in the 1970s, when he began to wonder why certain cultures favor highly spicy foods. He traveled to a village in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, to investigate, focusing on the differences between humans and animals. The residents there ate a diet heavy in chili-spiced food. Had their pigs and dogs also picked up a taste for it?
“I asked people in the village if they knew of any animals that liked hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said in an interview. “They thought that was hilariously funny. They said: No animals like hot pepper!” He tested that observation, giving pigs and dogs there a choice between an unspicy cheese cracker and one laced with hot sauce. They would eat both snacks, but they always chose the mild cracker first.
Next, Dr. Rozin tried to condition rats to like chilies. If he could get them to choose spicy snacks over bland ones, it would show that the presence of heat in cuisine was probably a straightforward matter of adaptation. He fed one group of rats a peppery diet from birth; another group had chili gradually added to its meals. Both groups continued to prefer nonspicy food. He spiked pepper-free food with a compound to make the rats sick, so they would later find it disgusting—but they still chose it over chili-laced food. He induced a vitamin-B deficiency in some rats, causing various heart, lung and muscular problems, then nursed them back to health with chili-flavored food: This reduced but didn’t eliminate their aversion to heat.
Actually, ‘we’ don’t like spicy food — I avoid it in the same way that I avoid cigarettes, whisky, hip-hop, and other Stupid Stuff People Do.