i've been thinking a lot about how people treat me when they think i have no spice tolerance. this is a little bit a stolen valor thing, because my spice tolerance isn't actually that bad--it's not fantastic, but i've been known to enjoy a buffalo sauce or a pickled jalapeno or so on. but if you tell people you don't like black pepper, their first response is usually something like "wow, your spice tolerance is that bad???", often followed by some kind of mockery. my actual problem with black pepper is that it tastes terrible and has a godawful aftertaste (i use white pepper in my cooking instead and sincerely recommend trying it if you don't like black pepper), but no one really considers that a possibility. it couldn't possibly be a preference; it has to be a weakness, a failure of a character. it's considered acceptable to make fun of someone for their low spice tolerance. it's considered acceptable to expect them to just grit their teeth and eat what everyone else is eating with no accommodations. it's considered acceptable to compare them negatively to children, and you should all know by this point how much i hate when children are used as rhetorical tools in this way.
like i said, my spice tolerance isn't that bad. but i have a friend who has no spice tolerance. at all. if something has even a little bit of spice, they're going to have a bad time. and what i've learned is that there is a level of spice where people will almost universally consider anything below it "not spicy", even if there is a detectable spice level. black pepper, for all that people love to jump to conclusions about my own spice tolerance in relation to it, is not considered spicy. if you ask "is this spicy?" about a food which contains (even quite large amounts of) black pepper, people will say "no." but it is spicy; it contains black pepper, which has a spice level.
so something is labeled mild. it's on a menu that uses little pictures of peppers to denote spiciness and it has no pepper next to it. someone says it's not spicy. is it actually not spicy? i've been training myself to detect very small levels of spice--or rather, i've always been able to tell when there are very small levels of spice. what i've been training myself to do is consciously notice when there are very small levels of spice. i'm able to warn my friend about foods i wouldn't have considered spicy a few years ago. they very graciously tried a fry i deemed "just barely spicy" in order to confirm my assessment, and they said i was exactly correct, and i'm feeling very smug about it. but these weren't the fries labeled "spicy fries" on the menu, you know?
i've been turning it over, and the best metaphor i've got is that most people think of spiciness as something that should be measured like celsius when really it should be measured like kelvin. we shouldn't arbitrarily put the 0 level, the "this doesn't count as spicy" label, somewhere spicy that we culturally think is the level at which no one reasonable will be bothered by the spice level. we should put it at actual 0, an actual complete lack of spice. the correct answer to "is this spicy" should frequently be "only a little bit" instead of "no". people with extremely low spice tolerances deserve our consideration, not our mockery. this is a food restriction it wouldn't be difficult to be more thoughtful about, one that you could measure with your tastebuds instead of having to check ingredients lists. you just have to pay attention to what you're actually tasting instead of what you've been told to label it.
This all makes a lot of sense, but I think it runs into a really deep and fundamental problem:
We don't know what the fuck "spicy" is.
Like, empirically, we simply aren't sure what people are reacting to, so far as I know? Like, we know most peppers have capsaicin in them, in black pepper it's "piperin", and I have no idea whether there are other chemicals that also produce this response!
There definitely are! Just like piperin is in peppercorns, you also have gingerol in ginger, allicin in garlic and onions, capsaicin in hot peppers, and the unintuitively named Allyl isothiocyanate in radishes, horseradish, and wasabi.
I think part of the problem is the subjectivity of 'spicy'- things I would consider spicy my mom would eat and belive had no spice whatsoever, since she has a much, much higher tolerance than I do. I think that subjectivity makes pepper icon ranking systems on menus fairly useless- I think the solution is ingredient lists that list *everything*, rather than just whatever they felt like listing.
I've had similar experiences to Quadrilateral- I loathe the taste of jalapeños even thougg I can tolerate the spice, but any time I ask for no jalapeños or ask if they are present I get teased for not being able to handle the heat, which is thoroughly obnoxious (as Quadrilateral mentioned themselves)
i'm always mystified by that, i've had jalapenos, and i don't care for them, but i don't even think they feel hot to me? like, i'm very confused as to why they have a reputation for being very hot, they're... like i *think* i'm detecting some kind of heat response, but it's subtle?
and poking around, i have found people arguing over whether or not cinnamon counts as "hot", and i'm now unclear on whether things like "red hots" are actually using cinnamon's spiciness or are some other spiciness plus a cinnamon flavor, and ... aaaa?
this is so much more complicated than i realized.
also if you had asked me whether garlic was at all spicy, i'd have said "no, it's sharp, that's different", but apparently i'm wrong.
Cinnamon has Cinnamaldehyde! Which activates the same receptors capscacin does, so it should definitely count as 'spicy', imo. No idea what red-hots use, it might just be a lot of cinnamaldehyde, could be something else. And yeah, jalapeños aren't usually considered very spicy, which is why I got teased about it- not being able to handle even a small amount of jalepeño is some kind of sign that I haven't lived up to societies expectations for pain tolerance, I guess. I think 'sharp' is running up into the issue of subjective experiences + individual physiology + exposure, I think- because how we experience taste is so wildly personalized, it's almost impossible to tell who is going to experience what with any given kind of food. My mom can handle capscacin like nobodies business, but more than a little raw garlic has her nope-ing out while I've added 4 cloves of raw garlic to my hummus like "yummy :)" while she's fleeing the house. If we really know someone well, we can give our opinions on how they're likely to react to something (like strictlyquadrilateral and their friend), but that's definitely a learned skill, since there's no 'perfect average' for any kind of spice tolerance.
Which puts me right back at "The best and safest way to help people make informed choices is to actually inform them about their choices." ("Natural flavors" and "Spice mix" on ingredient labels die challenge)
