Burning love - people who like very spicy foods

American Demographics, Oct, 1997 by Matthew Klein

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, the odds are he was a chilehead.

Terry Barckholtz and Melinda Shriner were married in May on a Caribbean-bound ocean liner. It sounds like the Love Boat, but this romantic trip had a twist. The cruise was sponsored by Chile Pepper magazine, and the couple spent their first wedded week with other lovers of things hot.

Not long ago, American food had a reputation for being stodgy, starchy, and soggy, with a bill of fare that ran the gamut from tuna casserole to Jell-O with bananas. Ketchup was the condiment for all seasons. The only thing preventing U.S. chow from being a global laughingstock may have been the even greater disdain with which epicures viewed British food. In recent years, however, regional and international flavors have been making inroads. Thai and Indian sauces are common on supermarket shelves alongside the current king of condiments, salsa.

But for some people, plain old "spicy" doesn't cut it. Chileheads like their food hot, hot, hot. Not to be confused with chiliheads, who are aficionados of the four-alarm tomato-sauce-based concoction, chileheads tap into tongue-burning foods and sauces that span the globe from Jamaica to Java.

Fiery-food eaters are a colorful bunch, as gourmets go. Whereas many connoisseurs present the coordination of the perfect appetizer, entree, and wine as a delicate ballet, chileheads are more likely to take an approach that seems half vaudeville, half rodeo. Sauces with names like "Jump Into an Open Grave," "Gib's Nuclear Hell," and "Ass in the Tub" vie for enthusiasts' dollars with T-shirts showing anthropomorphized peppers firing guns into the air.

"The whole genre tends to attract people who are characters," says Joel Gregory, publisher and editor-in-chief of Chile Pepper. "Or more than that, they're like lawyers who ride Harleys--they like to pose as characters. One way to do that is by collecting sauces, paraphernalia, wearables, and usables. You'll find these people wearing it, drinking out of cups displaying it." All the while, they're not taking it all that seriously.

HEATING UP THE MARKET

Chileheads have fun with food, yet they spend serious money on it. The median income of Chile Pepper readers is in the $90,000 range, and 25 percent have incomes of $100,000 or more. "The magazine appeals to affluent chileheads," says publisher Gregory. "This is by no means everyone, but it's a good deal of the economic drive behind the industry, which involves 5,000 manufacturers in the continental U.S."

Average everyday chileheads might not subscribe to Chile Pepper, but they help support the market for peppers, sauces, and other food products. They may even buy the occasional chile-decorated kitchen mitt or towel. And if there's a hot-food festival in town, they might spring a few bucks to check out the latest and greatest in the world of pepper.

The 10th annual Fiery Foods Show will be held in Albuquerque in March 1998. The 1997 show had 250 exhibitors, up from 37 in 1988. Just over 12,000 attendees checked out the action at $6 a pop for general admission. The Chile Pepper magazine Web site features a calendar of other such events, most of them held in southern and western states where hot is most popular.

Then there are the extremists. About 70 chileheads joined Barckholtz and Shriner on their Caribbean wedding cruise, along with 2,100 passengers of more conventional tastes. "At dinnertime, we always had a formal seating of six or seven tables, and they would bring out about 150 different types of hot sauce every night," says Barckholtz. "These waiters did not like us because they had to drag all this stuff out, and here they prepared all this food, and we would doctor up all the food that came."

Although he's been a spicy-food fan since childhood and describes himself as a self-made gourmet, even Barckholtz can still be surprised by chilehead antics. "It was pretty wild to meet some of these people," he says. "A lot of them were a heck of a lot crazier than I am. They were putting it on their ice cream."

One reason why chileheads are on the wild side may have to do with their gender. More than most other food-related niches, superspicy is a guy thing. "We have a two-to-one male-to-female readership. I doubt that's the case with any other food magazine," says Gregory. "So there is some macho in it. There's that edge to it of, `I can eat a hotter one than you can.'"

Temperatures aren't the only thing rising in the hot-food market. Volume is way up. Red-pepper imports to the U.S. totaled 48 million pounds in 1995, more than four times the 1976 level, according to the American Spice Trade Association. Supermarkets are the main purveyors of flaming fare, representing 79 percent of retail sales in 1994. Smaller grocery and specialty stores account for 13 percent of sales, and direct marketers claim 7 percent.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOT

Although a growing variety of spicy foods are now available in virtually every supermarket in the nation, the U.S. still harbors bastions of hotness. The Chile Belt stretches over 11 states, according to FIND/SVP of New York City. Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California make up this region, defined as the states where fiery foods are most popular, most engrained in local culture, and where a majority of manufacturers and marketers of hot products are located. It's no surprise that these states are home to a disproportionate share of Americans of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander descent.