A surprising number of us crave a healthy dose of pain for dinner. I’m talking about adding hot peppers to our dishes. While some may claim hot peppers are adding a “taste” of heat to dinner, from a physiological standpoint, capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for the heat, binds to a specific protein on your nerve endings called the TRPV1 receptor, creating pain.
While
this reaction to capsaicin is essentially a false alarm on a receptor that is
supposed to trigger at real temperatures above 106°F, the pain feels absolutely
genuine.
Again,
hot is not flavor; it’s pain. And, sincerely, I don’t enjoy eating pain. I
prefer my tacos merely warm and a good old mild comfort food such as macaroni
and cheese. Apparently, I’m just not wired for fire.
—Mitchell
Hegman
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