What To Do If You Can’t Eat Spicy Food
Published in
3 min readOct 8, 2020
- Take the first bite of your chosen spicy food. Ignore how red the dish looks, the amount of chili piled onto it. It can’t be that bad, right? It’s just for show.
- Raise the food to your mouth, eyes watering at how good and spicy it smells. The savory heat tickles your nose, luring you in. You bite.
- Take in how delicious it is. It’s so tasty, flavor bursting across your tongue like fireworks — hot, bright, and burning. It burns so bad.
- Down water to chase away the fire that’s raging in your mouth. It doesn’t help; if anything the pain feels worse, cool liquid stinging your raw tongue. Your friends and family laugh at you as tears fall from your eyes.
- Finally someone takes pity on you and offers you rice, mantou, something starchy — no milk, even if that’s supposed to ease the pain best (because let’s face it, you’re probably lactose-intolerant). Sweet relief, but only for a moment.
- The spice keeps going, aftershocks still moving across your tongue. You stuff more rice into your mouth, but even that has been stained red by stray drops of chili oil.
- Finally, finally, you can breathe without feeling the heat. You stick to the non-spicy food on the table from then on.
- Endure many long years of ridicule as you continue to try — and fail — to eat spicy food without becoming redder than the chili in the dish.
- One day, you discover you can, in fact, eat spicy things now. Food that used to be spicy like mapo tofu feels fine now, and your family is in awe. You bask in your newfound power, a world of possibility opening up as you are no longer held back by fear.
- You learn that not everything red is flaming hot, and not everything spicy is red. You eat them all with relish, cherishing the warmth in your throat as the spice burns, a gentle comfort instead of an inferno.
- Build yourself up to the point of trying the spicy ramen challenge (the black one, not the red one — not anytime soon). Ignore your alarm as you see the sauce, so red it’s almost black. You got this.
- You take the first bite. It hits you slowly first so you confidently take another; then it spreads all at once, so good but so painful at the same time. Even breathing hurts your tongue, flames roaring from every direction, an assault of pain and delight together.
- Regret.
- Take a break for five minutes and eat something else to soothe your tongue.
- Go back for more because it’s so delicious, why does it taste so good but hurt so bad?
- Finish the whole bowl. Your mouth is hotter than a volcano and you’re pretty sure you just sweat a bathtub’s worth, but you did it. You’ll probably do it again; it’s addictive, and you think you can handle it better next time.
- Congratulations! You can eat spicy food now!
