Chile Peppers

by Dave Dewitt

  In the city-by-city study, two New Mexico cities took the top spots. Santa Fe ranked as the top fiery-food city in the country, with one retailer for every 4,890 residents. Las Cruces was close behind, with one outlet per 5,000 people. Austin, Texas, came in third with one hot retailer per 6,700 residents.

  It should be pointed out that the data are not complete. To compile a truly comprehensive study of the geography of fiery food markets, it would be necessary to go beyond Mexican-food retailers and include Thai restaurants, East Indian restaurants and products, Hunan and Sichuan restaurants and markets, Caribbean and Cajun food, and New Southwestern restaurants and products. Although Mexican food currently constitutes the largest share of the chile pepper market, the other spicy cuisines are becoming quite popular as well.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL FIERY FOODS

  AND BARBECUE SHOW

  In 1987, two things happened that would change my life forever. That was the year that Robert Spiegel, Nancy Gerlach, and I launched Chile Pepper magazine as a quarterly publication. Robert was the publisher and owned all the stock in the company. Nancy was the food editor and I was the editor in chief. Being editor of a growing and successful magazine enabled me to have a platform and sell book after book about chiles and spicy foods. One of our greatest accomplishments with the magazine, though, was how we popularized the habanero chile, then thought to be the hottest pepper in the world. We constantly published news items, articles, and recipes about the habanero, and a lot of other media outlets followed our lead. In 1995, Ten Speed Press published The Habanero Cookbook, by Nancy Gerlach and me, and it sold well. About a year later, I noticed that Albertson’s supermarket was carrying fresh habaneros in the produce section, right next to the jalapeños. I felt proud. I know that sounds weird, but I couldn’t help but think I was at least partially responsible for the habaneros going mainstream.

  The 2001 National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Photograph by Harald Zoschke. Used with permission.

  The other thing that happened in 1987 was that I saw a tabletop display of Old El Paso products at the New Mexico Chile Conference, and that got me thinking. I had been a show producer for years, doing mostly custom-car shows, and as I drove back to Albuquerque, I thought, “This is a multibillion-dollar industry without a trade show. We ought to produce one.”

  I told my wife, Mary Jane, about the idea when I got back. She was teaching at Manzano High School but had the summer free, and as it turned out, she was a remarkably good phone salesperson. We decided to launch the show in a hotel venue because we had no idea how it would go, and the Convention Center was too big and expensive for us. The show was held in the fall of 1988, and we had 47 exhibitors and attendance of only about 500 people, but everyone loved the show and considered it a success. We made a net profit of about a hundred dollars. Hey, it was a start.

  We stayed in hotel venues for another couple of years as we grew the show. After we doubled exhibitors in our third year, we moved it to a small venue of about 15,000 square feet at the Albuquerque Convention Center, and attendance doubled. The following year, we took a 30,000-square-foot hall and nearly filled it. Time went by, attendance grew, and the Convention Center built the east complex and we moved to a 60,000-square-foot hall in it. Attendance at this time was about 10,000 people, and Budweiser, through its New Mexico distributor, became a major sponsor and remains one today. We stayed in the Southeast Hall for more than a decade and attendance grew to 12,000.

  Soon, a new opportunity presented itself. The biggest casino in New Mexico, Sandia Resort and Casino, expanded and had an exhibit hall plus meeting rooms and two large lobbies. I contacted them and they offered us a deal: free rent for three years if we would relocate the show. Who wouldn’t take an offer like that? We moved, and because the venue was a better destination than a building downtown next to the railroad tracks, our attendance increased 38 percent the first year we produced it there.

  We’re still there, looking forward to the exhibit hall’s expansion sometime in the near future. During Saturday morning’s opening, about 3,000 people lined up to come in; we filled up the entire parking lot for 2,000 cars, and the gamblers complained about not finding a parking space. So what did the casino do, kick us back to the Convention Center? No, they built a 2,500-car parking deck that opened in time for our 2015 show.

  The appeal of the show is so broad that it’s difficult to pinpoint demographics. We used to have more men than women attend the show, but now it’s 50-50—and that’s true for exhibitors too. And I would estimate that a third of exhibitors sell out of all the products they bring to the show.

  Our exhibitors love to wear costumes at the show. At left is the drumstick guy, Sean of Sean’s booYah!; on the right is Anna Shawver of Apple Canyon Gourmet. Photographs by Mark Masker. Work for hire.

  These days we have about 170 exhibitors and excellent attendance over the three days of the show. In 2019 we enjoyed our largest attendance ever—17,500 people.

  We have exhibitors and attendees from all over the world and get massive national publicity. We use a top-notch advertising agency and PR company to get the publicity and attendance, and we produce cooking demonstrations to entertain the public. I do probably 12–15 TV and radio interviews during the show, where I’m like a mayor of a small city for three days. It sure is fun. In 2019, a vote on USA Today online made us one of the top 10 specialty food festivals in North America, despite the fact that we’re a trade/consumer show, not a festival.

  WHY CHILES CONQUERED AMERICA

  I am constantly asked to explain the exponential growth of interest in chile peppers and the boom in fiery foods products in the US over the past few decades. How did a meat-and-potatoes America become enamored of hot sauces, salsas, spicy snack food, chili con carne, and hundreds and hundreds of other fiery foods? First, we must look at the historical trends for why cooks add spices to their foods in the first place.

  There are a number of explanations for why we have added spices such as chile peppers to our foods over the tens or hundreds of thousands of years that we have been cooking:

  •Spices make foods taste better.

  •The “eat-to-sweat” hypothesis: eating spicy foods makes us cool down during hot weather.

  •Spices disguise the taste of spoiled food.

  •Spices add nutritional value to food.

  •The antimicrobial hypothesis: spices kill harmful bacteria in food and aid in food preservation.

  Which of these explanations are correct?

  Your antibacterial pantry, including onions, garlic, chile pods, and many spices. Photograph by Zak Greant. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

  THE FIRST CORNELL UNIVERSITY STUDY

  In 1998, Jennifer Billing and Paul W. Sherman published a study in The Quarterly Review of Biology entitled “Antimicrobial Functions of Spices: Why Some Like It Hot.” The study examined the reasons why humans might use spices. They studied 4,578 recipes from 93 cookbooks on traditional, meat-based cuisines of 36 countries; the temperature and precipitation levels of each country; the horticultural ranges of 43 spice plants; and the antibacterial properties of each spice.

  The first thing they discovered was that many spices were incredibly antibacterial. For example, garlic, onion, allspice, and oregano were the best all-around microbe killers, killing almost everything. Next were thyme, cinnamon, tarragon, and cumin, which kill about 80 percent of all bacteria. Chile peppers were in the next group, with about a 75 percent kill rate. In the lower ranges of 25 percent were black pepper, ginger, and lime juice.

  Next, they learned that “countries with hotter climates used spices more frequently than countries with cooler climates. Indeed, in hot countries nearly every meat-based recipe calls for at least one spice, and most include many spices, especially the potent spices, whereas in cooler countries substantial fractions of dishes are prepared without spices, or with just a few.” Thus the estimated fracti
on of food-spoilage bacteria inhibited by the spices in each recipe is greater in hot than in cold climates, which makes sense since bacteria grow faster and better in warmer areas.

  The researchers addressed the various theories. First, obviously spices make food taste better, “but why do spices taste good? Traits that are beneficial are transmitted both culturally and genetically, and that includes taste receptors in our mouths and our taste for certain flavors. People who enjoyed food with antibacterial spices probably were healthier, especially in hot climates. They lived longer and left more offspring.”

  Billing and Sherman discounted the “eat-to-sweat” theory, noting that not all spices make people sweat and that there are easier ways to cool down, like moving into the shade. Regarding the theory that spices mask the odor of spoiled food, they noted that it “ignores the health dangers of ingesting spoiled food.” And since spices, except for chiles and citrus, add minimal nutritional value to food, that theory goes nowhere.

  That leaves just two theories: that spices make foods taste good, and that they kill harmful bacteria—and those two theories are inseparable. “I believe that recipes are a record of the history of the co-evolutionary race between us and our parasites. The microbes are competing with us for the same food,” Sherman says. “Everything we do with food—drying, cooking, smoking, salting or adding spices—is an attempt to keep from being poisoned by our microscopic competitors. They’re constantly mutating and evolving to stay ahead of us. One way we reduce food-borne illnesses is to add another spice to the recipe. Of course that makes the food taste different, and the people who learn to like the new taste are healthier for it. We believe the ultimate reason for using spices is to kill food-borne bacteria and fungi.”

  THE SECOND CORNELL UNIVERSITY STUDY

  In 2001, Paul W. Sherman and Geoffrey A. Hash continued the examination of spices in human diet with a study entitled “Why Vegetable Recipes Are Not Very Spicy,” published in Evolution and Human Behavior. They compiled information from 2,129 vegetable-only recipes from 107 traditional cookbooks of 36 countries. Then they examined the history of the spice trade and discovered that for thousands of years spices have been traded all over the world, resulting in their availability in most world cuisines. The most traded spices are black pepper and chile peppers, in that order.

  Many studies have proven that spices have antibacterial properties, that spices are more prevalent in warm climates than cool climates, and that the concentrations of spices in recipes are sufficient to kill bacteria. It is true that cooking eliminates the antimicrobial properties of some spices, such as cumin, but has no effect on others, such as chiles.

  The researchers compared the vegetable-only recipes to the previously studied meat recipes, according to the spices found in the recipes, and discovered that the vegetable recipes used far fewer spices than the meat recipes. They attributed this to the fact that bacteria “do not survive or proliferate as well in vegetables, so adding spices is not as necessary.” Interestingly, the four most common spices in both the meat and vegetable recipes were onion, black pepper, garlic, and chile peppers. Onion appeared in more than 60 percent of both types of recipes; black pepper in about 60 percent of the meat recipes and 48 percent of the vegetable recipes; garlic in 35 percent of the meat recipes and 20 percent of the vegetable recipes; and chile peppers in 22 percent of the meat recipes and 18 percent of the vegetable recipes.

  Within each of the 36 countries, vegetable-based recipes called for fewer spices than did meat recipes. The countries using the most spices in both vegetable and meat recipes were—in order from the most used—India, Vietnam, Kenya, Morocco, Mexico, Korea, and the Philippines. Following were France, Israel, and South Africa.

  In their second study, the researchers concluded: “By every measure, vegetable-based recipes were significantly less spicy than meat-based recipes. Results thus strongly support the antimicrobial hypothesis.”

  CHILE PEPPERS TAKE OVER

  But in the United States, with refrigerators and freezers in almost every home, the antimicrobial hypothesis simply does not explain the rush to embrace chiles and spicy foods over the past two decades. After answering questions verbally for literally dozens of media interviews, I finally decided to keep track of my reasons for why chile peppers have conquered the United States.

  •Ethnic diversity. Immigration patterns have changed and now feature new citizens with hot and spicy ingredients and cuisines imported from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. They immigrate and open restaurants and markets, making ethnic chiles and spicy foods commonplace.

  •Greater chile knowledge among Americans. They now realize that most chiles and spicy foods won’t hurt them.

  • Increasing interest in the hobbies of cooking, gardening, and traveling.

  •The large number of ethnic and hot and spicy cookbooks published since 1978—literally hundreds of them.

  •The increasing availability of chiles and fiery foods products in mainstream locations such as supermarkets and fast-food outlets.

  •The publicity generated by the constant media attention. The recent National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show in Albuquerque generated more than 5,000 column inches of coverage in US newspapers. Do a web search for terms like “chile peppers,” “spicy,” “hot sauce,” or “habanero” and stand back—you will get thousands and thousands of solid citations.

  •Trade and consumer shows and festivals featuring chiles and fiery foods.

  •The enormous increase in manufacturing, with thousands of fiery foods products now on the market.

  •The hobby of gardening. According to the National Gardening Association (NGA), 35 percent of households in the US grow food either at home or in a community garden. This means that two million more families are involved in gardening now, up 200 percent since 2008. All of these statistics were calculated by a special five-year report by the NGA, Garden to Table: A 5-Year Look at Food Gardening in America. The study tells us that many things have changed over the past five years—which age groups are most likely to garden, the types of food that are most popular to grow, why people garden, and garden location and size. Bonnie Plants, the largest US national grower and supplier of vegetable and herb plants for consumers, offers 53 different pepper varieties. That’s nothing compared to my friend and coauthor Janie Lamson. Her website, ChilePlants.com, offers 500 different varieties of chile-pepper bedding plants. Now, in addition to taking over the cuisines of countries and continents, they’re taking over our gardens.

  •The “addiction syndrome.” Chiles are not physically addicting—you don’t have withdrawal symptoms when you stop eating them. But they are psychologically addicting because chileheads miss the burn if they don’t have any spicy food for a while. I never hear anyone say, “Oh, I used to eat spicy food, but now I’m back to bland.” Once someone starts liking hot and spicy foods, he or she is likely to be a chilehead for life.

  THE ROZIN THEORY

  But perhaps the most fundamental reason for the boom in fiery foods is a major shift in the way many Americans are eating. My revelation began in Philadelphia while dining with Liz Rozin, who hosted an incredibly diverse dinner at Serrano Restaurant during the Book and the Cook Festival. She is a food historian with fascinating insights into the origins of spicy cuisines. “When we look at the broad spectrum of human flavoring practices, we see one curious correlation,” she writes in The Primal Cheeseburger. “The heavier the dependence on plant or vegetable foods, the more pronounced the seasonings; the heavier the consumption of animal foods, the less pronounced the seasonings. Those cuisines that clearly demonstrate a highly spiced or complex seasoning profile—Southeast Asia, India, Africa, Mexico—all have long relied on high-plant, low-meat diets.” Her theory, interestingly enough, directly contradicts the Cornell University studies just discussed!

  Of course, the US was just the opposite: a culture that in its early days relied on beef, pork, and chicken, as well as dairy foods. Vegetable foods in th
e US were eaten primarily in the same regions where the cuisine was also the spiciest: the South and the Southwest.

  When Rozin turns her attention to chile peppers in high-vegetable, low-meat cultures, she notes: “The pattern of acceptance, the level of enthusiasm with which the pungent chiles were enfolded into certain existing traditions, seems to indicate that the unique stimulation they provide is an important compensation for foods that are somehow less satisfying, less perfect when eaten unseasoned. And on the other hand, the chiles were largely ignored or rejected by cuisines and areas of the world where meat and other animal foods were a significant focus of the diet.”

  The cover of The Primal Cheeseburger. Scan by Sunbelt Archives.

  At least three other major food trends have paralleled the move to spicy foods over the past two decades: natural foods, vegetarian foods, and low-fat foods. Meat consumption has declined as well, setting the scene for the modern return of Liz Rozin’s theory of why ancient “less satisfying” foods were highly spiced: we need the heat and flavor of chiles and other spices to make up for the flavors of meat and fat lacking in more spartan cuisines. The new corollary of eating in the twenty-first century might be: “The healthier you eat, the more you need to spice it up with chile-laden condiments.”

  The Primal Cheeseburger was published in 1994. Liz will be happy to know that since then the green chile cheeseburger has become a cultural icon in New Mexico. The state fair has a Green Chile Cheeseburger Challenge, in which restaurant chefs compete to see who makes the best one. The year I was a judge, the winning restaurant was Fuddruckers, proving that even a fast-food restaurant chain with 223 locations can step up and make a great green chile cheeseburger. The tourism campaign for the state, “New Mexico True,” has an interactive New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger Trail that features restaurants specializing in that signature dish. And the Albuquerque Isotopes, a Minor League Baseball team in the Pacific Coast League, have joined the spicy promotion too. Their website reads, “With respect to one of the iconic culinary customs of New Mexico, on June 16, for one night only, the Albuquerque Isotopes will become the Albuquerque Green Chile Cheeseburgers. Isotopes Park will be decked out in a Green Chile Cheeseburger theme that night, with green chile cheeseburger sliders being served throughout the ballpark’s concession stands. Green chiles will be roasted on the concourse, as ‘The Lab’ will also be transformed into ‘The Grill.’”