I've never quite seen those almost interchangeable terms as awful at all. No, they really do wear t-shirts in the African bush. They do listen to rap in St. Lucia. But that's why culture is dynamic. People adopt components of the dominant economic influences in the world and make it their own. People want to wear t-shirts, even if travel writers want them to wear headdresses. If Italy really was all tradition - they wouldn't have taken Chinese pasta and made it better. There would be no tagliatelle, mostaccioli, conchiglie and radiatore. And the McDonald's in Saigon - that's just confusing trends in culture with bad taste, which is universal anyway. And there is no McDonald's in Saigon anyway. It's a myth, started by travel writers.
The highway to Truth & Consequences, New Mexico was road-blocked, so we veered off on the agriculture roads to Hatch. For all the flatness of Southern New Mexico, this little road that winds through a hill and cliff along the Rio Grande, is rather pleasant and slow-going. It is also laden with fields of short green plants with bright red ornaments. Atomic agriculture on the Rio Grande - as colorful as I imagined.
Hatch is like the Italy of the chili pepper. They make things better. Hatch may not be the largest chili growing center in the world, but it is the most innovative. Here they cross-pollinate, experiment, taste-test and develop the newest hybrids of the cayenne, improving upon old things.
We pull over the hill, and there you have it - the international Hatch Chili Festival - Ford Trucks, a circus tent, a grade school baseball game, and lots of t-shirts. We parked, we crossed the street, and into the circus tent in the desert.
Where were the habaneros, the serranos, that new variety of jalapeno, the ethnic cuisines, the food scientists and the hot sauce collectors? I wasn't expecting snobbery, but wasn't even one person showing off a new cross-pollinated arbol -scotch bonnet? Vendors were selling obnoxious chili-earrings, and chili t-shirts, and sculptures of lambs and religious icons. Nobody was even offering a salsa recipe, or even a curry.
There didn't seem to be anybody here from anywhere else. The faces were distinctly New Mexican - light brown - a mix of Spanish, Mexican, Indian. I was expecting enlightenment. What we got was Hatch. This was a local festival - a festival of the town's economic staple, like an annual tribal worship of corn.
Jane had made herself comfortable waiting for the chili-eating contest to begin. I found her sitting between a family of Indians, with their children wrapped in blankets, and their cowboy hats. I told her I wanted to leave. We did not belong here.
I asked Jane if she thought the plant was a narcotic. Like tobacco, or cocaine. This is the thing about the chili – which was used by Aztecs as a tear gas bomb against Columbus, which was used by Isthmus Indians as a form of punishment for their children. The chili doesn’t have that much of a taste. The capsaicin chemical is totally tasteless. If so many cultures are eating the chili, every day, every morning, infused in their food – are they addicted?
Chili capsaicin makes me violent. It is a grand sensation; the mad rush of adrenaline. The false pain, the compounds called endorphins which come to rescue you from the pain that doesn’t even exist. I like a nice strong habanero paste, late at night, and a little Jerry Garcia on the radio. Then I feel like taking a club and smashing things. I feel like breaking everything. It’s a great sensation, because that’s when I write.
But you know, this violence, this pain, the heat. The reason that chilis taste hot is not coincidental to evolution. They were designed that way, to repel you from them. But more precisely, the reason is because of the way that mammals shit.
By the time a mammal craps, it has churned its food, digested it, made a mash out of it. Some seeds can survive this digestion, but not the seeds of the family Solanaceae, which are small and fragile. The purpose of a fruit is to disperse its seeds. That's why chilis stay green until their seeds are ready for their voyage, to wherever. When they're ready to go, they turn a bright orange or red, so that the birds can see them.
Why the birds, though? The chili's heat is actually a chemical designed to specifically interact with the receptors on a mammals tongue for heat - it keeps the folks who want to eat it before its red from eating it. The birds, of course, whose eyesight keeps them from the green, are unaffected. And, it so happens, that birds poo in a way quite favorable to the chili seed. The effect is a winged dispersal - a longer voyage, to somewhere else. A seed falling far from the tree.
It is interesting then, that the chili's ability to flourish in the world is not due to some damn parrot, but a few tribes of canoeing mammals, and a man named Columbus, in search of peppercorns.
