I'm the Guy. The real guy. And I say we go in, we beat this unwinnable level and we get to the other side where untold riches and a bounty fit for ten kings awaits us!
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.
This all makes a lot of sense, but I think it runs into a really deep and fundamental problem:
We don't know what the fuck "spicy" is.
Like, empirically, we simply aren't sure what people are reacting to, so far as I know? Like, we know most peppers have capsaicin in them, in black pepper it's "piperin", and I have no idea whether there are other chemicals that also produce this response!
There definitely are! Just like piperin is in peppercorns, you also have gingerol in ginger, allicin in garlic and onions, capsaicin in hot peppers, and the unintuitively named Allyl isothiocyanate in radishes, horseradish, and wasabi.
I think part of the problem is the subjectivity of 'spicy'- things I would consider spicy my mom would eat and belive had no spice whatsoever, since she has a much, much higher tolerance than I do. I think that subjectivity makes pepper icon ranking systems on menus fairly useless- I think the solution is ingredient lists that list *everything*, rather than just whatever they felt like listing.
I've had similar experiences to Quadrilateral- I loathe the taste of jalapeños even thougg I can tolerate the spice, but any time I ask for no jalapeños or ask if they are present I get teased for not being able to handle the heat, which is thoroughly obnoxious (as Quadrilateral mentioned themselves)
i'm always mystified by that, i've had jalapenos, and i don't care for them, but i don't even think they feel hot to me? like, i'm very confused as to why they have a reputation for being very hot, they're... like i *think* i'm detecting some kind of heat response, but it's subtle?
and poking around, i have found people arguing over whether or not cinnamon counts as "hot", and i'm now unclear on whether things like "red hots" are actually using cinnamon's spiciness or are some other spiciness plus a cinnamon flavor, and ... aaaa?
this is so much more complicated than i realized.
also if you had asked me whether garlic was at all spicy, i'd have said "no, it's sharp, that's different", but apparently i'm wrong.
Yeah, I think this is partially a case of "people are assholes about food" but also "people have dramatically different taste receptors." Black pepper tastes like nothing to me unless you're dumping in literal spoonfuls, and even then I only taste a hint of the peperin burn, there's no flavor to it for me. It's just that stuff that makes some food have black speckles. I would not cook with it if someone said they didn't like it or it hurt them but until seeing this post, I didn't think it had a taste for anyone. Anyway, as someone who gets heartburn from fennel seeds, an ingredient only ever listed as "spices", we need specific ingredient lists and for people to be kind to each other.
I collaborated with the Human Artistry Project to make this strip alongside other web cartoonists to make the point that “Stealing isn’t Innovation” when it comes to A.I. usage. It seems to be doing numbers on instagram and elsewhere, so you may also read it here, tumblr.
May the discourse that ensues be long and unhelpful.
Man at my job just told me to “hold your little horsies just a little longer ☺️” about the task I’ve been waiting for him to complete or at the very least update me on for six weeks. Brendan, I will fuck your adult son. You’re gonna start seeing me at family Christmas. Horsies in tow.
friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly
like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices
Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.
The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.
The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.
There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.
The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.
I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.
#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies
stormborns
areudirty
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
gummygunk
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
