The Hot Sauce Path to Mindfulness
Culinary sensory bombardment and the journey to a mindful state.

I’ve always liked a little extra heat in my food and I regularly have a few fresh chilis chopped into almost anything I’m having. Here are casual observations I made of people whose culinary senses are being bombarded with heat, and the visible mindful journey the experience takes them on.
Obviously, there are countless activities and events in life that evoke a mindful state - skydiving, good sex, even terminal illness - but today, I want to view this state of awareness through the unlikely filter of hot chicken wings.
Hot Ones
Recently, for whatever reason, my YouTube’s discovery algorithm served up an episode of a show by First We Feast called Hot Ones, a web based series featuring celebrities being interviewed while consuming progressively hotter chicken wings, in a bid to “earn” a shot at plugging a project.
After watching a couple of episodes, something interesting struck me - the guests are paying attention …in real time. And no, I’m not referring to the usual attentive, quick-witted or charming persona they deploy to promote projects. In this instance, I’m referring to their attention almost wholly being focused on themselves and their physical experience in that moment. They seem to achieve a heightened sense of things similar to states of awareness mostly reached through mindfulness meditation. Specifically, I’m referring to mindfulness as it applies to day-to-day life, as opposed to the more structured formal practice. Our daily life is the meditation, they say.

Why mindfulness?
“dude, I’m having an out-of-body experience right now” - Hasan Minhaj
“Oommm…” - Cara Delevingne
“I’m drunk, it’s like I’m drunk, or high… something aint right” - Kevin Hart
“I’m hallucinating right now” - Jordan Peele
Listen, you’ve got Neil deGrasse Tyson calling the host a “bitch” and Bobby Lee shitting himself, ok? The show is for real. It takes you places.
The Host
The show’s host (and producer), Sean Evans, is very nondescript. Like someone in witness protection, he gives off both an urban and suburban vibe. Clean-shaven, bald-ing, sporting a hoodie, though there’s the occasional cardigan or flannel. But personality-wise, not really saying much. You could watch the show now and be sitting next to him in a restaurant an hour later and not know it. Or physically place him at any public crime scene with relative confidence that he won’t be ID’d by eye witnesses in a line-up. He could be anyone. What are you hiding, Sean?

It’s the perfect on-air personality for the show’s format and a brilliant example of less is more.
The Journey
“…it’s no big deal”
The guest is introduced to viewers and the hot sauce line-up is introduced to the guest. This phase is filled with pleasantries, small talk, comments about sauce flavor, and naturally, interview questions. Guests rightly pat themselves on the back for having gone through a wing or two without incident. A few up it a scoch to bravado.
“I can hang” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Tabasco …I got this” - Andy Cohen
“Fuck you, tabasco” - Charlie Day
Feel the heat
This begins at varying points along the heat gamut for different guests since it obviously depends on the guest’s tolerance to hot food. Here, guests pause for the first time to feel the heat of the sauce, and awareness seems to transition from the pleasant tingling sensation and flavour appreciation to something worthy of a little more attention. Their faces hint that attention is turning inwards, and the more generous guests start sharing their physical experience.

Wait, what?
As you might imagine, this is the truly interesting stage. First, and obviously, the guest is now fully attending to bodily sensations. Any attentional resources previously assigned to socially navigate the interview have, by now, been hijacked by feedback from the tongue, nose, eyes, face, …everything. Awareness is held hostage by physical sensations as guests start cutting Sean off mid-sentence with free-flowing commentary on what they are experiencing. The format loosens up - this is where guests come online, as it were.

A meditation variant known as open monitoring kicks in here. The jar of water, the glass of almond milk, and the host all come into focus. The water and milk, in an obvious search for immediate relief, but the host more from a trust valuation standpoint. Nothing says introspection like having to question who to trust, right? A few guests verbalize this reassessment of trust, but whether it’s said or not, it’s always in their watery eyes as they blink in disbelief. They suddenly realise that Sean is taking down scorching hot wings without any hassle and, if anything, is disingenuously playing up his feeling-the-heat-too routine to feign solidarity and encourage them to keep hurting themselves.

This is also when Sean, seasoned gestapo interrogator that he is, throws a curve by asking a question that demands auditory attentiveness and a detailed response, further heightening the guest’s attentional dissonance. They can barely track what he’s asking them. He sends this probe a couple of seconds after the bite that seems to have switched them on, and his delivery is deadpan. Those that can muster a coherent response do so, but pretty much anything can come flying out - and not necessarily verbal, as it turns out.
“Why are you asking the deepest most referencial shit” - Jordan Peele

Those who make it to the last wing have to deal with Sean’s shameless goading: “its customary here to dab the last wing, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to”
“fuck that, man” - Seth Rogen
“Sean, you go to hell” - Keegan-Michael Key
The plug
Having completed the course, it’s noteworthy that no guest I’ve seen seems to care in the least about the projects they came to promote. The world, their perceived issues, things they held as important coming in, all fall away. They reel off scant details about their projects without any real conviction. This is the celebrity in a mindful state, if this sensory hostage situation can be referred to as that. At the very least, they are now fully present.

Hall of Fame
For various reasons and in no particuler order:
Russel Brand: The signature calmness and appreciation of sensation that marks a mindful human being. He’s for real.
Padma Lakshmi: Frankly the most graceful and understated guest so far. I can’t say more without decending into perversion and depravity. #oh
Kevin Hart: Real honest, real quick. How can you not respect that?
Charlie Day: “You’re a legend” - Sean Evans
Cara Delevingne: The surpise. Trooper. Watch this one - she’s mustard!
Guy Fiery: “Oh …and for the record, no water no milk” (mic drop)
Dax Shepard: Solving math questions after requesting an extra wing. Unrivalled machismo. Clearly needs boundaries!
It Is Always Now
Mindfulness is not always some serene contemplative state. It’s everything - an awareness of awareness itself in the present moment, pleasant or otherwise. So, fine, not all the guests might have dropped as deep as this more formal definition, but they’re definitely half way there, in my view. Mindfulness is a real time phenomenon, and human beings rarely ever grant “the now” the attention it requires or deserves.
This is a useful platform for any public figure looking to connect with their audience becasue it doesn’t matter how it plays out, they pick up loads of coolness points just for showing up.
