i've been thinking a lot about how people treat me when they think i have no spice tolerance. this is a little bit a stolen valor thing, because my spice tolerance isn't actually that bad--it's not fantastic, but i've been known to enjoy a buffalo sauce or a pickled jalapeno or so on. but if you tell people you don't like black pepper, their first response is usually something like "wow, your spice tolerance is that bad???", often followed by some kind of mockery. my actual problem with black pepper is that it tastes terrible and has a godawful aftertaste (i use white pepper in my cooking instead and sincerely recommend trying it if you don't like black pepper), but no one really considers that a possibility. it couldn't possibly be a preference; it has to be a weakness, a failure of a character. it's considered acceptable to make fun of someone for their low spice tolerance. it's considered acceptable to expect them to just grit their teeth and eat what everyone else is eating with no accommodations. it's considered acceptable to compare them negatively to children, and you should all know by this point how much i hate when children are used as rhetorical tools in this way.
like i said, my spice tolerance isn't that bad. but i have a friend who has no spice tolerance. at all. if something has even a little bit of spice, they're going to have a bad time. and what i've learned is that there is a level of spice where people will almost universally consider anything below it "not spicy", even if there is a detectable spice level. black pepper, for all that people love to jump to conclusions about my own spice tolerance in relation to it, is not considered spicy. if you ask "is this spicy?" about a food which contains (even quite large amounts of) black pepper, people will say "no." but it is spicy; it contains black pepper, which has a spice level.
so something is labeled mild. it's on a menu that uses little pictures of peppers to denote spiciness and it has no pepper next to it. someone says it's not spicy. is it actually not spicy? i've been training myself to detect very small levels of spice--or rather, i've always been able to tell when there are very small levels of spice. what i've been training myself to do is consciously notice when there are very small levels of spice. i'm able to warn my friend about foods i wouldn't have considered spicy a few years ago. they very graciously tried a fry i deemed "just barely spicy" in order to confirm my assessment, and they said i was exactly correct, and i'm feeling very smug about it. but these weren't the fries labeled "spicy fries" on the menu, you know?
i've been turning it over, and the best metaphor i've got is that most people think of spiciness as something that should be measured like celsius when really it should be measured like kelvin. we shouldn't arbitrarily put the 0 level, the "this doesn't count as spicy" label, somewhere spicy that we culturally think is the level at which no one reasonable will be bothered by the spice level. we should put it at actual 0, an actual complete lack of spice. the correct answer to "is this spicy" should frequently be "only a little bit" instead of "no". people with extremely low spice tolerances deserve our consideration, not our mockery. this is a food restriction it wouldn't be difficult to be more thoughtful about, one that you could measure with your tastebuds instead of having to check ingredients lists. you just have to pay attention to what you're actually tasting instead of what you've been told to label it.
