Chili pepper
Chili peppers, spicy fruits from the genus Capsicum, originated in South and Central America but have since spread all over the world.
#Human relationship
Chilis evolved to produce capsaicin as a defense mechanism to discourage animals from eating them. However, humans enjoyed the spicy taste and started using them to flavor food. Different kinds of chili peppers contain varying levels of capsaicin, providing varying levels of spiciness.
People of the Fifth World will often dry and grind peppers into a spice to flavor other dishes, or cut up fresh peppers to cook in sauces, curries, and dips. They will stuff some mild chilies with ground meat or other fillings. Communities with access to ancient cast-iron frying pans may fry peppers in oil before adding more ingredients, to draw out the spicy flavor.
Gardening villages living in areas where elephants roam will also plant chili peppers around the borders of their gardens to discourage the animals from trampling them (elephants have very sensitive noses and strongly dislike the smell).
#Chili People
While many communities enjoy chili peppers and eagerly gather them, to truly focus on one’s relationship with chilies a community must commit itself to gardening and the village life that comes with it. Chili peppers typically need a lot of sun, so communities that focus on them will tend to favor open prairies to forest or woodland environments. A relationship with chili peppers can shape a community in any number of unique ways, though. Some examples include:
- A community that focuses on chili peppers will naturally develop a particularly spicy cuisine. They’ll likely develop a reputation among their neighbors for their ability to enjoy far spicier food, and their dishes will develop a reputation as something bold and exotic. Such communities might create chili powders, infused oils, and hot causes. They might develop ceramics or glassblowing traditions to make portable containers for these products, so they can store them and trade them with others. Members of the community might find great personal, artistic expression in creating unique containers that identify their intended contents by shape, size, color, and decoration. These small pieces of art may become trophies among neighboring communities, or even in the community itself, with an empty container marking that its owner managed to finish its contents, proving her ability to endure the heat that container indicates.
- A community that focuses on its relationship with chilies may use them in tests of endurance. For example, a rite of passage might require a young person to take a dangerous path to an isolated garden where the community has cultivated a particularly spicy variety of chili. The initiate must bring back one of these chilies, and then eat it before the entire community.
- Another community might develop ever spicier chilies, not for ritual use, but as a weapon. Such a community might use a number of ways to weaponize the chili’s oils, for example, in bladders that they can throw on their enemies. Such communities may have an even greater interest in using chilies in trials of endurance than others, requiring their members to prove their ability to endure their own weapons. Even with such ingenious weapons, war doesn’t make any more sense for such a community than it does for anyone else, but it does help spread a reputation among their neighbors that those who violate their territory will live to regret it.
- Communities focusing on their relationship with chilies may view the fruits as spiritual protectors, hanging strings of chilies by their doors to ward off evil spirits. If descended from, or influenced by, modern-day Hindus, they may string together seven green chilies and a lemon for good luck. Or they may ritually burn chilies, as the Aztecs traditionally did during funerals.
- As chili peppers have great medicinal value, a community focusing on its relationship with chilies may also focus on healing. They may make salves containing pain-relieving capsaicin, perhaps kept in ceramic or carved wooden containers. Their wizards may also smoke chili peppers, or consume especially strong chili peppers, to facilitate their travel into the spirit world.