I love cooking and almost always cook from scratch. Cooking is my relaxation – preferably unhurried, accompanied by the BBC World Service (or sometimes Sunrise Radio if I am in a very Indian mood) and a glass of very chilled white wine. This would seem to put me in a dwindling category as people in the UK and all over the world change and adapt their eating and cooking habits in response to changing lifestyles. I am amazed by the number of people (men and women) who virtually do not cook in the evening after work – or at all, either eating out or buying microwave ready meals – and then probably spend their evenings watching other people cook on the TV.
Perhaps it was because I was vegetarian for many years – at a time when it was not so widespread in the UK – that I had to experiment and cook new things. Or perhaps just natural curiosity to explore the wider world. Indian food was a natural choice for me, not only because of my general interest in South Asia, but also because of the range of vegetarian food available and the ability to take relatively cheap and humble ingredients such as lentils or chick peas and turn them into tasty and nutritious dishes. Susen will still tell the story of the first time he came round to my house and I made him shingaras (samosas) from scratch. Truly, I wasn’t trying to impress! – something made me think about them and then I felt inspired to go and make them.
The trouble is that a lot of Indian food is spicy – sometimes very spicy. Similarly with Thai, Vietnamese, some Chinese and Mexican food – all of which I love experimenting with. And I really can’t eat spicy food, and it’s not for want of trying. I have been in an Indian restaurant with my Pakistani friend and she will be quite happily eating the food, thinking it is quite mild, while I am sitting there with my mouth burning and tears streaming down my face. One memorable occasion was at the Mango Tree (Thai) restaurant with Susen, where I unwittingly bit on a whole piece of chilli. I could not eat or speak for about 20 minutes until my mouth had calmed down a bit from the torture of the chilli heat. Susen will say that he was not brought up in a Bengali way, but more an English way – but still, he can tolerate chilli heat to a far greater extent that I can. Similarly my sister-in-law, who is Indonesian, will put chilli sauce on everything, even the hottest curry, otherwise she complains that it is too mild for her. My sensitivity is actually annoying for me because it means many of the foods I love experimenting with, particularly if eating out, are just out of bounds. Not only that, but chillis are supposed to be good for you, reportedly increasing your metabolic rate and making it easier to lose weight. (Evidence for this is hard to come across, but one small study seemed to indicate that compared with eating no cayenne pepper with the meal, 1g of pepper reduced salty, sweet and fatty food cravings and also increased energy expenditure [1]).
I began to wonder whether tolerance to chillis was genetic. This might explain why I, as a fair skinned Northern European type, brought up on bland food, cannot eat spicy food - whereas my Indian / Pakistani / Indonesian friends and relatives can. If all a nation’s food is spicy, then what do babies and children eat? Can they tolerate chillis as well? If so, it might make it more likely that it is genetic.
My initial research efforts, however, seemed to indicate that tolerance to chillis is not genetic, but acquired. Www.seriouseats.com even has a useful guide on ‘6 ways to build your spicy food tolerance’. In summary, these are:
1. Start small
2. Savour the flavour
3. Increase the spice – slowly
4. Keep it on the side
5. Have coolants on hand
6. Don’t force it.
On this basis, I have tried now for many years to increase my tolerance. I could say it has gone up perhaps 10%, but not much more than that. Maybe I am just not trying hard enough.
Jason Goldman, however, is on my wavelength. He writes that spiciness means pain. The sensation of spiciness is the result of the activation of pain receptors in the tongue [2] . Boy, can I testify to that! Most young children, apparently, even from cultures known for their spicy recipes, do not like capsaicin (capsaicin is the chemical in the chilli that causes the heat - found mainly in the internal membrane, not the seeds as many believe). According to my sister-in-law, in Indonesia they cook separate, less spicy food for babies and children then gradually transition them onto spicy food. Adult liking of capsaicin, however, seems to be almost universal, being incorporated into almost every culture (even the bland North European diet now). Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be that much evidence that desensitisation, or tolerance actually occurs – there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between age and tolerance (which you might expect, from having eaten chillis over a longer period of time). Other researchers have commented that the oral receptors are sending the same message to the brain for both the chilli lover and the chilli hater – so those chilli-loving humans must have learnt to like the pain of the same sensation to which young children, chilli-haters and non-human animals are averse. Goldman likens this to other thrill-seeking behaviour such as rollercoasters or skydiving. Chillis give this same kind of thrill while knowing they will not cause harm. A kind of benign masochism.
So, I don’t hold out too much hope for increasing my chilli tolerance in the near future. But India as a nation of thrill-seekers and benign masochists? Now there’s a thought.
[1] Ludy MJ, Mattes RD. The effects of hedonically acceptable red pepper doses on thermogenesis and appetite. Physiology & Behavior 2011 102; 251-258, cited at http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/04April/Pages/chilli-peppers-fat-burning-and-appetite.aspx
[2] Jason Goldman, ‘Why do we eat chilli?’ – The Guardian Science Blog, 14 Sept 2010.
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