capsaicin (about 48,000 Scoville units), and 12μm of capsaicin
(about 192,000 Scoville units).
For reference, cayenne peppers range from 20,000 to 50,000
Scoville units and Habaneros can range from 100,000 to 350,000 units.
These aren’t the hottest peppers. That would be the Carolina Reaper,
named by Guinness World Records as the hottest pepper on the planet.
More than 200 times spicier than a jalapeno, it’s rated as 1,569,300
Scoville Heat Units but can range as high as 2.2 million SHUs.^37
The subjects were to take a spoonful of the jelly, flip it
over and then place it on their tongue. After that they were to
rate the intensity of the burn (no sensation to strongest imagin-
able sensation of any kind) and also how much they liked the
jelly. What did the researchers discover? Sensation-seeking pre-
dicted how much they would like the hottest capsaicin-spiked
jelly but not the moderately or non-spiked jelly. Sensation-
seeking also correlated with how much they liked spicy meals,
how much they enjoyed the burn of a spicy meal, and early
intake of spicy meals. No other personality trait they measured
was related with spicy foods at all. Their takeaway was that the
burn of a spicy meal might be innately rewarding for high
sensation-seekers.
But not all fearless foodies are driven by the unusual or
spicy. Some try foods to be closer to other cultures. Jenny is a food
critic and author of a column that features ethnic cuisine. I asked
her what got her interested in writing about food.
“After I graduated from college, I went on an overly ambi-
tious solo trip through China. I was in the western part of the
country, and it’s very different there than it is here. You go to these
small food stalls in markets, and they have all of the ingredients laid
out on a folding table – snake, squirrel, and all sorts of other weird
stuff. You choose the ingredients, then they prepare it for you. There
were times I ate something on the side of the street, and I had no idea
what it really was. Hopefully it was something good.”
“It was a little frightening for me. I am not the kind of foodie
that is like, ‘Give me something, the weirder the better.’ I’m not the
kind of person that goes and loves to eat a bunch of offal meats, but
I am very open to new food experiences. For me I wanted to find the
quickest inroad into the culture...and it’s food. That’s the best way
you can communicate, and relate, and taste, and get a sense of other
cultures...you get so much more information, and you’re literally
internalizing it, instead of going around with a guide book.”64 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:13, subject to the Cambridge