The Inexplicable Appeal of Spicy Food

I love very spicy food. But my love of spicy food is kind of inexplicable, even to me. The burning feeling that you get from eating spicy food is painful. That feeling, by itself, just plain hurts. And like most people, I think that pain makes your life worse. All else being equal, your life goes worse for you to the extent that it is painful. So why do I, and lots of other people, eat spicy food? 

One possibility is that, even though the burning feeling hurts, this pain isn’t unpleasant. It seems that this can happen, at least in certain medical contexts. Patients with the rare condition of pain asymbolia seem to be capable of feeling pain, but they don’t register these feelings as unpleasant — they’re willing to hurt themselves in various ways without any complaints and without flinching. Recognizing the distinction between pain and unpleasantness, maybe we should say that it’s not pain that makes your life worse, it’s unpleasant pain. And for people who love spicy food, the burning feeling is painful but not unpleasant.

I can only speak for myself, but this doesn’t ring true to me. The burning feeling is unpleasant. I prefer to have my spicy food with a tall glass of almond milk, and for good reason. Drinking almond milk relieves the burning feeling, which is good because that feeling is unpleasant. If the burning feeling never went away, or if recurred at all hours of the day, that would be terrible.

A second possibility is that, even though the burning feeling is unpleasant, the overall experience of eating spicy food is pleasant. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t explain why I don’t just lay off the spiciness and keep the rest of the meal the same. Maybe the unpleasant heat makes the rest of the meal more pleasant than it would otherwise be? The idea here is that the unpleasant feeling is bad in itself, but it serves the good of making the whole meal more pleasant. It’s like the bitter medicine you take in order to get healthy; you’re enduring something bad in service to a good end. 

But again this doesn’t ring true. Usually we regret having to endure something bad in order to get something good, but that’s not at all how I feel about spicy food. I don’t think anyone is out there thinking “These tacos are so delicious, but it’s a shame I have to put up with the spicy bits in order to get the pleasures of the bits that aren’t spicy!” People who like spicy food want to feel the burning feeling, they’re not just putting up with it.

This leads to a third possibility: namely that I, and other lovers of spicy food, simply desire the burning feeling, and it is good for us to feel it because it is good to get what one desires. So the burning experience is both good for me and bad for me — good because I desire it, bad because it is pleasant. This raises an immediate question: given that the burning feeling is unpleasant, why on Earth do I desire it? Why desire an unpleasant experience? Perhaps the right thing to say is that there is no explanation — I just want it, and there is nothing further to be said about why I want it. On the resulting view I, and other spicy food lovers, are simply unfortunate for being subject to this imprudent desire. If we desired some other gustatory experience — the taste of rosemary, for example — we could satisfy this desire about as easily as we can satisfy our desire for the burning experience, and we would get the good of desire satisfaction without the bad of unpleasantness. So we’d be significantly better off if we managed to stop wanting spicy food and learned to want something else. 

Perhaps this is right, but it’s hard to believe that the desire for spicy food is so blatantly imprudent. It doesn’t seem like other blatantly imprudent desires, like a desire to be itchy all over. Maybe I’m only confabulating. But it seems there is something that I, and other spicy-food-lovers, get out of eating spicy food, and it’s not just a matter of satisfying desires for a certain kind of unpleasant experience.

This leads to a fourth and final proposal. Maybe the experience of eating spicy food is good for me in a way that isn’t reducible to pleasantness and unpleasantness at all. The idea here is that, to to determine how good the overall experience is, you don’t just “add up” all the pleasantness and “subtract” the unpleasantness. Why not? The only thing I can think of is that eating a spicy meal is a kind of accomplishment, and it counts as an accomplishment because you have to overcome the unpleasant burning feeling. On this view, the unpleasantness doesn’t cause the good of accomplishment, like bitter medicine causes the good of health. Instead, the unpleasantness is part of the good of accomplishment. As for why accomplishment is good, this could be because accomplishment is good in itself, or because we desire it.

In some ways I think this is the best proposal I have considered, but I’m not satisfied with it either. For one thing it seems at least a little silly to describe eating spicy food as an accomplishment. Eating spicy tacos isn’t like mountain climbing. For another thing, this proposal threatens to reintroduce the possibility that spicy food lovers have blatantly imprudent desires — we desire this kind of “accomplishment”, when we would be much better off desiring some other kind. Even staying within the realm of gustatory “accomplishments”, it would be better to become a foodie and become skilled at detecting subtle flavors. Then we could have some “accomplishment” in our meals, and in a way that does not involve any unpleasant experience.

All told, then, I’m not fully satisfied with any explanation of the desire to eat spicy food. Later today I am going to buy some really spicy salsa, from the only grocery store in my area that sells it, and on some level I don’t really know why.