"The body thinks it’s on fire, so it unleashes a wave of endorphins to help quell the burning. You start to feel something akin to a runner’s high. The sharp stinging pain will subside, but the rush — and subsequent sense of tranquility — lasts a bit longer."
This is called going into Shock!!
I've always liked spicy food but not to the point they cause physical discomfort this just seems like a waste of good spices to me, a far more economical solution would be to just eat a piece of conservatively spiced chicken then have your buddy kick You in the balls.
Dunno, I (and most people around the world) quite enjoy the feeling.
Keep in mind, chilies are native only to Mexico/Central America. Yet almost every culture on earth has adopted them into its cuisine (India, China, Thailand, basically every Asian cuisine except maybe Japan, African cuisines, a bunch of European cuisines, etc...).
The single most popular dish prepared at home in Japan is curry rice. Most Japanese curries are not particularly spicy, but they definitely do have a chilli kick and chains like Coco Ichiban do a brisk business selling up amped-up versions.
Fair enough, I wasn't sure about how much Japanese enjoyed chilies, in my limited experience (we have tons of sushi, ramen and Izakaya style joints here but relatively few Japanese people) Japanese food seems much milder than most other Asian cuisines.
They like to advertise spicyness but most of the time it's not really as spicy as it's marketed. Once however, I tried that Tabasco Scorpion sauce I found at a 100-yen Lawson, thinking it would be the usual bullshit and I've been taken for a ride.
I may be wrong but I am curious to know whether there is any correlation between spicy cuisine and a hot climate? There are some counter-examples ( e.g., certain northern Chinese cuisines are spicier than Cantonese) but typically spicier cuisines are associated with tropical countries.
There's a correlation for sure, chilies also only grow in relatively warm weather, but the fact they spread so far in the first place is testamount to their appeal.
They're so popular in so many countries that people forget they originated only in the new world...
One explanation I’ve heard proposed is that the sweating induced by spicy foods helps you cool down faster in hot climates than just your body trying to maintain homeostasis.
I think there is a definite enhancement to foods that spices provide but there is a big difference between enough spice to break a sweat and having a numbness on your pallet for example and feeling like you are going to die.
Like I said I like spicy food but not to extreme that my stomach is upset for hours after eating it and finding myself suffering on the back end for 3 days after eating it.
At some point it is just self abuse and should not be seen as a sign of strength or masculinity but rather stupidity along the lines of eating Tide pods or doing the cinnamon challenge solely for the entertainment of others watching you suffer.
Probably the best example of a good balance is the legendary Sushi chefs who use the blowfish as an ingredient to allow enough poison to achieve the desired effect but not so much as to make the customer gravely ill.
Another example might be what seems to be occurring with the opioid endemic.
Please research shock and endorphin release and reconsider your argument.
I understand that many people enjoy the sensations related to eating highly spiced foods but as the article mention this can result in hours of digestive discomfort and sometimes there is a 3 day price to pay for indulging in such activity when expelling what was consumed.
I feel there is a reasonable argument that pleasure through pain is a self destructive activity along the lines of "cutting" or auto erotic self asphyxiation.
Glorifying such things is in my opinion has a negative outcome.
Absolutely nothing, the article I read was about the pain and suffering a tourist experiences when they order extra spicy hot chicken. I think that if you enjoy the spice and feel no discomfort then the spices are at the correct level for you.
Interesting aside about the 'Ghost Pepper' (Bhut Jolokia) referred to in the article, a former world record holder for hottest chilli pepper, native to Northeast India: the 'ghost' (bhut) label arises from a fun linguistic misunderstanding.
Using IAST notation/Devanagari, the 'bhut' is actually 'bhōṭ/भोट' (which means 'Bhutanese' in this context, from the Sanskrit for 'Tibet'), not 'bhut/भुत' or 'bhūt/भूत' (which means ghost/spirit, from the Sanskrit for 'past'). So Bhut Jolokia actually means 'Bhutanese Pepper', which is decidedly less interesting than 'Ghost Pepper'; hence (probably) the popularity of the latter meaning.
Why assume a chicken can't tell that it's suffering? I mean, I'll go on eating it either way, but don't you think you might be kidding yourself a little here?
The concept of "self" as distinct from "other/environment" is quite a complex cognitive construction and requires a lot of moving parts. It doesn't seem straightforward to me to assume that all beings share a means to achieve this understanding, when unthinking automata can relatively easily simulate the same behaviors in all scenarios that a chicken expresses vs, say, an elephant, dolphin, or human.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that understanding "suffering" as a concept is necessary in order to suffer. That may be justifiable, but it certainly requires justification.
I think you are misconstruing. There is another possibility, which is that a negative experience is less metaphysically meaningful when the experience is pure "pain", without the added self-reflective component which can be distinguished as "suffering".
I've been in pain bad enough that, had someone asked me my name, I'd have needed a while to come up with an answer that would itself have taken real effort just to say. I don't know whether that experience was more or less "metaphysically meaningful", a term I note you seem in no hurry to define, for the fact that it drove my consciousness so far into abeyance that I could no longer perceive even the passage of time. I don't think it matters either way, because while it's happening that kind of pain becomes the only real thing in the world. Why should this be any less true for a chicken than for me?
The difference is the self-reflection on the other side of that pain. While you were in it, it was pure experience. It is only by reflecting on those moments that one transforms pain into suffering. If you are able to experience only pain, excluding selfhood, then perhaps ignorance really is bliss? Can you really say there is anything "bad" if there is no lasting trauma borne upon a sentient (self-knowing) being?
"Metaphysically meaningful" is a bit of a copout, agreed. It can be tautologically defined as "that sentiment which describes the satisfaction derived from the quasi-optimality of outcomes with respect to the consensus moral framework". Concisely, "meaningful vs consensus morality". Of course there will be interplay between what morality the consensus achieves and what can be considered meaningful. But I think few would disagree that more closely analyzing the various kinds of negative experiences will inform our collective morals "for the better" (again tautological here, but to deny evolution of morality is simply reactionary philosophy and shall not be tolerated).
> It is only by reflecting on those moments that one transforms pain into suffering.
Sorry to be so blunt, but this is just risible nonsense. I did not need to reflect after the fact on those hours of pain in order to have suffered through them; that happened entirely without my input. Indeed, it was not possible to suffer that pain once no longer experiencing it, because it's not possible to remember the experience per se - I mean, that it occurred, obviously, but what it was like? No.
> Can you really say there is anything "bad" if there is no lasting trauma borne upon a sentient (self-knowing) being?
Most certainly I can. As I alluded to earlier, I was barely sentient during those interminable hours, and this posed no obstacle in practice to suffering - indeed, I rather found it left me unable to do anything else. Likewise, the lack of lasting trauma from that experience does nothing to ameliorate the nature of the experience itself. Again, I find nothing here to suggest a meaningful axis of distinction between chicken or cow and dolphin or human.
(Of interest, I think, is that your argument serves equally well to justify torture inflicted under an amnestic medication such as midazolam, so long as the chosen method of torture itself inflicts no lasting injury. I don't say that you do so use the argument, of course, but I think it's fair on this basis to suggest the argument may not be fully developed in the form presented here.)
I also have to admit that the argument from "metaphysical meaning" fails to convince. The definition seems couched vaguely in utilitarianism, but turns on a concept of "collective consensus" that is itself ill defined - a collective of whom? Consensus around what? You can pretty much assert what you like here, so far as I can tell - which is of course both true and fair, but seems difficult to defend as anything beyond opinion.
Simpler, I think, to consider that livestock animals do have the capacity to suffer, that their lives in factory farms indeed consist of no other sort of experience save suffering, and then to eat them anyway because as a member of this planet's apex predator species it neither appeals to nor behooves me to weep over cows.
I would make the case that a chicken fully understands the concept of pain, feels pain itself, and inflicts pain on other beings as a tool for maintaining a social compliance.
Just the existence of something like a "pecking order" should demonstrate all you need to know to understand that the chicken doing the pecking knows in advance that the peck will inflict pain on the one being pecked and that the inflicted pain will cause that animal to alter their behavior by either recognizing the authority of the one doing the pecking, or by challenging that authority.
The sweetest cat that I ever had, now enjoying her (9 - n) life somewhere else, was the one true queen and ruler of everything mobile or potentially mobile on our property. Scraps of paper thrown from redneck's trucks as they passed along the highway became objects of great amusement as she slapped them into compliance with what she considered to be their place in her personal space.
Mice, rats, birds, lizards, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, and all manner of insects were both entertainment and sustenance. She had no fear of anything and a great love for all the humans she had chosen to adopt. She was the top of the food chain at our place until I decided to raise chickens.
I purchased a dozen young hens, none of them taller than the cat, and kept them confined in a mobile cage that I moved around the property. I was hoping that I could one day use the grown chickens to help control the fire ant and grasshopper populations since chickens always seemed to me to be not only simple-minded, but single-mindedly focused on eating anything that moved.
The cat watched these birds with obvious anticipation of their eventual freedom. She would sit outside the screened cage and observe them scratching and pecking and could occasionally be seen with a paw extended into the cage in an attempt to touch them. Within the cage the birds adapted to each other and a sort of social pecking order developed where one bird grew to be the dominant bird and ended up controlling the others like her own personal flock.
In time, I released the birds from the cage and they adapted to life outside the wire. Several were killed by my two clumsy black Labs who chased them down and murdered them before I could jump the fence and stop the carnage.
They were all still relatively small and the cat finally had an opportunity to touch them and exert some level of control over them. She would place herself in a position where the birds had to pass and as they passed she would reach out and pat or slap them on the head. This was all fun and games for her. Passing her and being slapped was a sort of toll inflicted on the birds and once she had patted them down she would wander off to find something more interesting.
Finally Ruby, the dominant bird, decided that she had had enough of that cat's shit and as soon as she had been patted, she jumped onto the trailer beside the cat and pecked the cat hard on the head between the eyes sending the cat scooting across the yard like furred lightning putting as much distance between herself and the birds as she could manage. From that day on, the cat gave the chickens a wide berth and a healthy dose of respect. In fact, during one attack where we lost a couple of chickens to a hawk she rushed in to defend Ruby from the hawk.
Sadly enough, Ruby eventually was killed by a couple of loose dogs belonging to a neighbor and my poor cat, queen of everything in our local universe, had to be euthanized. After 14 years as an outside cat she was ready for a new start somewhere else. I hope she found a nice warm spot with lots of distractions.
This story got too long but the general summary is that a chicken knows pain, feels pain, knows how to use pain as a tool to force compliance and that anyone who doesn't know this needs to spend a little time watching them and how they interact in their social world.
I eat a plant-based diet and believe that almost everyone reading this comment can and should give up eating meat.
That said, in theory some reduction in meat eating is better than none (although in terms of effect on climate change/future of humanity everything is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point).
I think it’s best if most people reading this comment think of meat as a rare treat rather than an everyday indulgence. So enjoy the spicy chicken sandwich once in awhile even if I’d rather you ate no meat at all.
I don’t think anyone should eat meat, outside of those who cannot survive otherwise. That’s almost nobody though.
Any suffering that animals experience by being farmed which is not strictly necessary for survival, is totally unnecessary, and I think unnecessary suffering is wrong, regardless of the species of the victim.
I wonder how the plant feels about us ripping those pungent leaves from its branches to flavor our soups or stealing its seeds to grind them into powder for our BBQ rubs. Does the sound of the combine harvester cause the wheat to envy the cow's mobility when you harvest and it has to accept the fact that it cannot escape? If you could convert the chemical signal that a plant sends to its neighbors that an insect is chewing its leaves into a sound, would that sound be a scream steadily increasing in volume as the insect crunches its way through the leaf? Would it be a mournful cry or a war whoop?
I don't want to turn this into an argument about consuming chicken but I feel I must share my point of view regarding this matter. I am fortunate enough to have enough space to raise a personal flock of chickens and on occasion I am required to end their lives. This is absolutely not something that I take pleasure in but feel that I have provided a good life without pain and anxiety to my animals and although they do suffer a brief moment of anxiety and possibly pain, I have taken the responsibility of raising my own meat including the dispatching of their short lives in a humane way. I am personally against factory farms for their affect on the environment and in my opinion production of a lower quality meat but feel that my animals have one bad moment on my farm and a far better than average life otherwise, unlike what occurs in large factory chicken houses and processing plants. I respect life in all it's forms and believe there is a place where the consumption of animals and their welfare can coexist.
Consider the humanity of euthanizing a pet, to argue killing is diametrically opposed to an animals welfare is a false statement.
I think chicken is a perfect vehicle for spices. I like to experiment with spices so I look for things that will give me a taste of how the rest of the world enjoys their food. A couple of years ago I found a Peri-peri spice mix in the import section of our local grocery store so I bought some to try it out.
It is spicy and the heat level can be too much for someone who doesn't enjoy a good burn after the burst of chili flavor. My family is a mix of high heat lovers and mild heat lovers so I found that a couple of us wanted less heat while the others enjoyed it. I grilled the chicken over coals and the combination of spice and char makes a delicious flavor profile. I had totally forgotten about this spice blend. Thanks for the reminder.
43 comments
[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadThis is called going into Shock!!
I've always liked spicy food but not to the point they cause physical discomfort this just seems like a waste of good spices to me, a far more economical solution would be to just eat a piece of conservatively spiced chicken then have your buddy kick You in the balls.
Keep in mind, chilies are native only to Mexico/Central America. Yet almost every culture on earth has adopted them into its cuisine (India, China, Thailand, basically every Asian cuisine except maybe Japan, African cuisines, a bunch of European cuisines, etc...).
They're so popular in so many countries that people forget they originated only in the new world...
Like I said I like spicy food but not to extreme that my stomach is upset for hours after eating it and finding myself suffering on the back end for 3 days after eating it.
At some point it is just self abuse and should not be seen as a sign of strength or masculinity but rather stupidity along the lines of eating Tide pods or doing the cinnamon challenge solely for the entertainment of others watching you suffer.
Another example might be what seems to be occurring with the opioid endemic.
I understand that many people enjoy the sensations related to eating highly spiced foods but as the article mention this can result in hours of digestive discomfort and sometimes there is a 3 day price to pay for indulging in such activity when expelling what was consumed.
I feel there is a reasonable argument that pleasure through pain is a self destructive activity along the lines of "cutting" or auto erotic self asphyxiation.
Glorifying such things is in my opinion has a negative outcome.
What's wrong with that?
Interesting aside about the 'Ghost Pepper' (Bhut Jolokia) referred to in the article, a former world record holder for hottest chilli pepper, native to Northeast India: the 'ghost' (bhut) label arises from a fun linguistic misunderstanding.
Using IAST notation/Devanagari, the 'bhut' is actually 'bhōṭ/भोट' (which means 'Bhutanese' in this context, from the Sanskrit for 'Tibet'), not 'bhut/भुत' or 'bhūt/भूत' (which means ghost/spirit, from the Sanskrit for 'past'). So Bhut Jolokia actually means 'Bhutanese Pepper', which is decidedly less interesting than 'Ghost Pepper'; hence (probably) the popularity of the latter meaning.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bhut%20jolokia
"Metaphysically meaningful" is a bit of a copout, agreed. It can be tautologically defined as "that sentiment which describes the satisfaction derived from the quasi-optimality of outcomes with respect to the consensus moral framework". Concisely, "meaningful vs consensus morality". Of course there will be interplay between what morality the consensus achieves and what can be considered meaningful. But I think few would disagree that more closely analyzing the various kinds of negative experiences will inform our collective morals "for the better" (again tautological here, but to deny evolution of morality is simply reactionary philosophy and shall not be tolerated).
Sorry to be so blunt, but this is just risible nonsense. I did not need to reflect after the fact on those hours of pain in order to have suffered through them; that happened entirely without my input. Indeed, it was not possible to suffer that pain once no longer experiencing it, because it's not possible to remember the experience per se - I mean, that it occurred, obviously, but what it was like? No.
> Can you really say there is anything "bad" if there is no lasting trauma borne upon a sentient (self-knowing) being?
Most certainly I can. As I alluded to earlier, I was barely sentient during those interminable hours, and this posed no obstacle in practice to suffering - indeed, I rather found it left me unable to do anything else. Likewise, the lack of lasting trauma from that experience does nothing to ameliorate the nature of the experience itself. Again, I find nothing here to suggest a meaningful axis of distinction between chicken or cow and dolphin or human.
(Of interest, I think, is that your argument serves equally well to justify torture inflicted under an amnestic medication such as midazolam, so long as the chosen method of torture itself inflicts no lasting injury. I don't say that you do so use the argument, of course, but I think it's fair on this basis to suggest the argument may not be fully developed in the form presented here.)
I also have to admit that the argument from "metaphysical meaning" fails to convince. The definition seems couched vaguely in utilitarianism, but turns on a concept of "collective consensus" that is itself ill defined - a collective of whom? Consensus around what? You can pretty much assert what you like here, so far as I can tell - which is of course both true and fair, but seems difficult to defend as anything beyond opinion.
Simpler, I think, to consider that livestock animals do have the capacity to suffer, that their lives in factory farms indeed consist of no other sort of experience save suffering, and then to eat them anyway because as a member of this planet's apex predator species it neither appeals to nor behooves me to weep over cows.
Just the existence of something like a "pecking order" should demonstrate all you need to know to understand that the chicken doing the pecking knows in advance that the peck will inflict pain on the one being pecked and that the inflicted pain will cause that animal to alter their behavior by either recognizing the authority of the one doing the pecking, or by challenging that authority.
The sweetest cat that I ever had, now enjoying her (9 - n) life somewhere else, was the one true queen and ruler of everything mobile or potentially mobile on our property. Scraps of paper thrown from redneck's trucks as they passed along the highway became objects of great amusement as she slapped them into compliance with what she considered to be their place in her personal space.
Mice, rats, birds, lizards, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, and all manner of insects were both entertainment and sustenance. She had no fear of anything and a great love for all the humans she had chosen to adopt. She was the top of the food chain at our place until I decided to raise chickens.
I purchased a dozen young hens, none of them taller than the cat, and kept them confined in a mobile cage that I moved around the property. I was hoping that I could one day use the grown chickens to help control the fire ant and grasshopper populations since chickens always seemed to me to be not only simple-minded, but single-mindedly focused on eating anything that moved.
The cat watched these birds with obvious anticipation of their eventual freedom. She would sit outside the screened cage and observe them scratching and pecking and could occasionally be seen with a paw extended into the cage in an attempt to touch them. Within the cage the birds adapted to each other and a sort of social pecking order developed where one bird grew to be the dominant bird and ended up controlling the others like her own personal flock.
In time, I released the birds from the cage and they adapted to life outside the wire. Several were killed by my two clumsy black Labs who chased them down and murdered them before I could jump the fence and stop the carnage.
They were all still relatively small and the cat finally had an opportunity to touch them and exert some level of control over them. She would place herself in a position where the birds had to pass and as they passed she would reach out and pat or slap them on the head. This was all fun and games for her. Passing her and being slapped was a sort of toll inflicted on the birds and once she had patted them down she would wander off to find something more interesting.
Finally Ruby, the dominant bird, decided that she had had enough of that cat's shit and as soon as she had been patted, she jumped onto the trailer beside the cat and pecked the cat hard on the head between the eyes sending the cat scooting across the yard like furred lightning putting as much distance between herself and the birds as she could manage. From that day on, the cat gave the chickens a wide berth and a healthy dose of respect. In fact, during one attack where we lost a couple of chickens to a hawk she rushed in to defend Ruby from the hawk.
Sadly enough, Ruby eventually was killed by a couple of loose dogs belonging to a neighbor and my poor cat, queen of everything in our local universe, had to be euthanized. After 14 years as an outside cat she was ready for a new start somewhere else. I hope she found a nice warm spot with lots of distractions.
This story got too long but the general summary is that a chicken knows pain, feels pain, knows how to use pain as a tool to force compliance and that anyone who doesn't know this needs to spend a little time watching them and how they interact in their social world.
That said, in theory some reduction in meat eating is better than none (although in terms of effect on climate change/future of humanity everything is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point).
I think it’s best if most people reading this comment think of meat as a rare treat rather than an everyday indulgence. So enjoy the spicy chicken sandwich once in awhile even if I’d rather you ate no meat at all.
Any suffering that animals experience by being farmed which is not strictly necessary for survival, is totally unnecessary, and I think unnecessary suffering is wrong, regardless of the species of the victim.
Watch me kick a dog and a house plant and see which one you stop me from doing again.
Consider the humanity of euthanizing a pet, to argue killing is diametrically opposed to an animals welfare is a false statement.
It is spicy and the heat level can be too much for someone who doesn't enjoy a good burn after the burst of chili flavor. My family is a mix of high heat lovers and mild heat lovers so I found that a couple of us wanted less heat while the others enjoyed it. I grilled the chicken over coals and the combination of spice and char makes a delicious flavor profile. I had totally forgotten about this spice blend. Thanks for the reminder.