Hot Stuff
The world hot pepper eating champion has a secret
“Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.” — Plato
Hot Stuff
By Spyder Darling
To look at Manhattan’s Julia “No Nickname” Benet you’d never think she was the IEF, International Eating Federation’s world champion in the hot pepper division. The fashionably dressed, usually in all black, five foot one, 97 pound, sixty four year old with the collarbone haircut dyed chestnut brown, looks like she would be more at home in the orchestra section of a Broadway play, attending a fashion show by the hippest up and coming designer or working on her backhand at a private rooftop tennis facility.
But no, here she is at a farmer’s market in Easton, Pennsylvania of all places, the site of this year’s World Hot Pepper Eating Championship, standing next to a trophy almost as tall as she with a gold plated “Dragon’s Breath” pepper on top.
For those not in the know, the Dragon Breath pepper, originally cultivated in Wales, is said to be the hottest pepper in the world with a Scoville rating of 2.48 million heat units. And you thought Georgia asphalt, Hell and Paris Hilton were hot. Fughetaboudit, as they say in Brooklyn.
