Source: Economic Daily
When it comes to eating spicy, the Chinese are intransmissible. According to statistics, the number of people who eat spicy food in China has reached 500 million. Especially in Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunxiang and other regions, people have taken their ability to eat spicy food to the extreme, and they have eaten at an "artistic level". Today, China is the world's largest producer and consumer of chili peppers.
However, in the long history of human cultivation and consumption of chili peppers, China did not appear early, and the reason why it was able to catch up and become a big chili country is the result of the interweaving and mutual influence of various complex geographical, social and economic factors.
Historians generally believe that chili peppers originated in South America. At least 7,000 years ago, the Indians in present-day Mexico, Costa Rica, and other places began cultivating chili peppers. They use chili peppers as an important condiment and make them into everyday dishes. To this day, Mexico is still a country where chili culture flourishes, and almost every Mexican lives with chili peppers. There's a Mexican proverb: "Everyone will find the right pepper for them." "It's easy to find all sorts of chili sauces in Mexican kitchens or in local restaurants. Mexican peppers are also eaten in a variety of ways: fresh and dry, served with sauces, and even mixed with fruits, pastries, sweets, drinks, ice cream, etc.
Like many species, the "fate" of chili peppers changed during the Age of Discovery. Before the Age of Discovery, spices such as pepper were popular in Europe and were important condiments for the wealthy class of Europe. One of the purposes of Columbus's voyage was to get pepper and other spices to India.
However, instead of finding India, Columbus arrived in the Americas by accident. In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and established the first European colony in the Americas. It was also on this island that he discovered chili peppers and brought them back to Europe as a substitute for pepper. In 1493, when Columbus returned to Spain, Chili followed his ships and set foot in Europe for the first time.
In Chili, the Spaniards seem to see new business opportunities. For many years, the Spaniards had not tasted much of the pepper trade. Because pepper is mainly produced in India, it is usually sold by Indians to Arab merchants before being shipped to Egypt and Italy for resale to merchants across Europe. After several turnovers and price increases, the pepper that Europeans get is extremely expensive. And, since European merchants were at the end of this trade chain, profits were rather limited. Spaniards have discovered that peppers are more spicy and cheaper than peppers, and have the potential to become the new condiment. What's more, the origin and seeds of the peppers are controlled by the Spaniards, and the supply is guaranteed, whether it is grown locally or transported from South America.
However, reality did not develop according to what the Spaniards envisioned. On the one hand, many Europeans found it difficult to accept chili peppers as food for a while, and for a long time they only used them as bonsai to decorate their gardens. On the other hand, in the chili trade, the Portuguese came from behind and played a more important role.
With da Gama's success in opening new shipping routes, the Portuguese discovered the local pepper variety in Brazil at the beginning of the 16th century, which spread to the rest of Asia: first to the coast of Africa, then to the coast of India, and then to the rest of Asia.
Quite different from the fate of being used as an ornamental plant in Europe, in Africa and Asia, chili peppers quickly became a "meal on the plate" for local residents. In Africa, the process has been particularly rapid. Africans have a long tradition of consuming spicy condiments and have a high acceptance of chili peppers. Seeing this, the Portuguese focused their market development directly on Africa, and it was a great success. In addition, peppers themselves are easy to grow and shelf-stable, so they quickly "gained a foothold" in Africa.
Following European caravans and merchant ships, Chili arrived in China at the end of the 16th century. Historians believe that there are two routes for chili peppers to enter China: one is by land, that is, through the overland Silk Road, from West Asia to Xinjiang, Gansu, Shaanxi and other places, and the other is by sea, through the Strait of Malacca into southern China, where it is cultivated in Yunnan, Guangxi and Hunan, and then gradually expanded to the whole country.
Chili peppers are also known as sweet peppers and sea peppers in China. About 100 years after entering China, by the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, chili peppers had become a common ingredient in southwest China.
Chili peppers were quickly accepted in Yunnan, Guichuan and other places, which is inseparable from the local salt shortage environment. Guizhou does not produce salt, and salt is transported from other places, and the quantity is small and the price is high. In order to eat a less bite of salt, people have thought of many ways, such as "replacing salt with acid" was once very popular. Until the emergence of chili peppers, Guizhou people found a better substitute for salt. Soon, spicy food became popular in the local area, and the civilian diet found its own way. The chili pepper landscape then expanded.
With the continuous excavation of the market value of peppers and the continuous improvement of planting technology, the types of peppers are becoming more and more abundant. At present, there are about 50,000 known varieties of chili peppers in the world. With the development of processing technology, the use of chili pepper is also increasing, in addition to being processed into chili paste, dried chili pepper and chili oil and other products, capsaicin, capsanthin, capsaicin and other fields are also widely used in medical, food additives and other fields. According to statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world's chili production reached 36.28 million tons in 2021, with the 10 largest producers being China, Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, Spain, Egypt, Nigeria, the United States, the Netherlands and Tunisia.
While the variety and use of peppers continues to increase, there are also those who are exploring in the other direction - cultivating peppers with higher spiciness.
In 1912, the American pharmacist Wilber Scowell devised an experimental method for measuring the spiciness of chili peppers. He grinds a certain weight of dried chili peppers into powder, then extracts capsaicin with alcohol, and dilutes the capsaicin in sugar water to reduce its concentration until at least 3 out of 5 subjects with specific training do not taste the spiciness at all. As a result, the Scoville Indicator (SHU) has become the most commonly used unit of measurement of spiciness. For example, dried chili extract that needs to be diluted with 10,000 times sugar water has a spiciness index of 10,000 SHU.
After the birth of the Scoville indicator, there was a unified method of measuring spiciness, and the craze for cultivating "super peppers" rose. In 2012, Ed Currie, the head of a pepper company in South Carolina, USA, cultivated chili peppers with an average Scoville index of 1.64 million SHU and a maximum of 2.2 million SHU. This level of spiciness means that the pepper must be diluted to 1 part per 1.64 million or less to completely neutralize its spiciness. In contrast, the average Scoville index of Chaotian pepper, the best pepper commonly eaten by Chinese, is only 30,000 SHU. Ed Currie named the pepper "Carolina Grim Reaper Pepper" and became the hottest pepper to be certified by the Guinness Book of World Records at the time.
Ten years later, Ed Currie broke his record again by breeding a variety called "Chili X" with an average spiciness of 2.69 million SHU. Ed Currie, the first taster of Pepper X, described its spiciness as follows: "After eating, for more than 3 hours, I felt feverish all over, followed by stomach cramps for more than 4 hours. I lay flat on the marble slab in the rain for about 1 hour, moaning in pain......"
Obviously, it is so spicy that ordinary people are afraid that they will not be blessed. However, it is conceivable that as an industrial raw material, it will bring a more hot future to the entire pepper industry. (Source of this article: Economic Daily Author: Yuan Yong)