International hot and spicy food day is for all the daring taste buds that love to feel the fire. We wanted to take a look at what’s behind the spice and take a look at some interesting facts and figures about hot and spicy food.
Today, January 16th, is International Hot & Spicy Food Day!
Five Food Facts About Spicy Food:
- People who are really into eating spicy food are considered pyro-gourmaniacs
- Christopher Columbus discovered chili peppers when he ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1493.
- People have been using hot and spicy seasonings in their food for more than 6,000 years according to archaeologists.
- The best way to ease the burning sensation of flaming hot peppers or overly-spicy mustard of horseradish is with cold milk or yogurt. Chilies contain a substance called capsaicin that makes taste buds sting. When capsaicin touches the taste buds, our heat-detecting neural sensors send a message straight to the brain: “fire!” Milk, however, contains casein, a fat-loving compound that binds with spicy capsaicin oil and then washes it away. Avoid water as it won’t mix with the oil and will only result in moving the heat to other parts of your mouth.
- Capsaicin, the chemical in peppers that makes them hot, isn’t found in any other plant and is potent enough that people can identify it even when the concentration is as little as one part per million.
Hey! Did you know?
The Scoville scale is the measurement of the pungency (spicy heat) of chili peppers or other spicy foods as reported in Scoville heat units (SHU),[1] a function of capsaicin concentration. The scale is named after its creator, American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. His method, devised in 1912, is known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test.
Unlike methods based on high-performance liquid chromatography, the Scoville scale is an empirical measurement dependent on the capsaicin sensitivity of testers and so is not a precise or accurate method to measure capsaicinoid concentration.
We think hot and spicy food is the way to go! So many of our translators and interpreters living across the globe enjoy hot and spicy foods with all of their meals — maybe that helps their linguistic skills?? Get in touch with us for your multilingual needs so we can match up a linguist for your international project.