Original subtitles

♪

(Dave) Chili peppers always had

an aura of mystery about them.

There are so many

different varieties of chili peppers,

and so many different cuisines

that have chili peppers in them.

And there's more chili peppers

that are being grown now than ever before

in the history of the world.

♪

(basket thumping)

(leaves rustling)

♪

(Ivette) It's something that carries personality.

It's something that makes people smile,

it makes people laugh.

It's something that causes people

to have physical reactions.

♪

(Troy) What is more rock and roll

than hot peppers?

It's an endorphin enkephalin rush,

I think it's a safe alternative to drug use.

♪

(machines whirring)

(Ivette) Some people are so obsessed with it.

I feel like that started a frenzy in chiliheads,

and everybody wanted to see who could make it hotter

and hotter and hotter.

♪

Definitely, it is a pepper war.

(people cheering)

(crunching)

(Dave) I'm afraid that somebody

is going to overdose on super hot peppers

to the point where they can't breathe.

(announcer speaking incoherently)

How can these peppers have so much power over people?

(seeds rustling)

♪

(narrator) Mankind has a strange relationship

with the hot chili pepper.

(people cheering)

Throughout history,

every culture that has been exposed

to this fruit that bites back

has formed an immediate fascination with it.

Love it or hate it,

the hot pepper has now

taken over the world.

(leaves rustling)

(pensive music)

♪

At once a source of pain

and of pleasure,

hot peppers create strong reactions

in everyone who tastes them.

♪

Some are repelled

by the sensation they bring,

while others seem to become addicted

and seek stronger and stronger sources.

♪

Humans' fascination with the pepper

has caused them to propagate the plant

in every corner of the Earth.

The pepper's chemical defense mechanism

has ironically made it become a popular food

in cultures all over the world.

♪

Could this be the mythical forbidden fruit:

a simple seedpod

bestowed with the ability

to bring both good and evil?

♪

(birds chirping)

♪

But what motivates humans

to play with fire like this?

♪

To find the answer to this apparent contradiction,

we have to travel back in time.

Science is tracing the history of man's obsession

with the chili pepper.

♪

(Ivette) I think it's just novel,

you know, it's so cool

to see a plant produce

something so toxic.

In peppers,

capsaicin is produced

so herbivores don't eat the peppers

before the seeds are ready.

So, it's a way to communicate with animals.

Capsaicin is only produced

in chili peppers.

They turn on something

in our bodies.

So, in our mouth,

it's going to feel like heat.

So these are the same receptors that detect pain.

The compound makes your body

think that it is temperature even though

there's no actual temperature to it,

and since it's on the nerve cells,

you could actually damage your nerve cells.

And it's volatile,

so you can also feel it

in the air,

and it can actually get on your skin

without you even touching it.

(mortar and pestle scraping)

♪

All the records that we have suggest

that they were incredibly important

to the Indigenous people of the Americas.

In terms of historic evidence,

we've basically learned

that chili peppers were incredibly sacred.

They take part in, for example, origin stories.

We do have Spanish chroniclers

that talk about how chili peppers

were used in, for example, warfare

to be able to sort of create a tear gas.

(coughing and screaming)

There are certain ritual spaces that we see

where people were burning things like chili peppers,

probably to induce some of the mucus linings,

and there's a sense that this allowed for an easier uptake

of certain hallucinogenic drugs.

But for the most part, our sense is that chili peppers

were mainly used for consumption.

♪

So what we have here

are a few examples

of archeological seeds,

archeological chili pepper seeds

from human feces.

So, this is called paleofeces,

which is just essentially old poop

that we found in archeological sites.

But this is just showing you how hearty these seeds are,

they survive the digestive system, for example.

And so they have managed

to find their way to us.

(man) Wow.

(laughing)

It's hard not to make poop jokes.

(laughing)

The oldest sample that I've looked at is

a little bit over 10,000 years old,

and we don't think that that's necessarily the oldest evidence

of chili pepper use in the Americas, and so...

I think it's probably one of the earliest plants

that people really engaged with

when they came to the Americas.

(man) Can we say that those people were

among the first chiliheads?

I would say they were chiliheads,

and the history of chiliheads probably extends further back

than any of us would think.

(birds chirping)

(narrator) It's believed that the very first

hot pepper to grow on Earth

sprouted somewhere in the Bolivian forest.

The plant's seeds would have been spread by birds,

who are immune to capsaicin,

the chemical that gives the hot pepper its heat.

♪

(hummingbird's wings buzzing)

♪

In time, the plant had spread to Mexico,

where it was soon incorporated

into the culture to the point that

it became synonymous with the region.

(upbeat music)

(narrator) The hot pepper has worked its way

into the very fiber of life in Mexico.

♪

The spicy fruit runs in the veins

of the population here.

Mexicans consume chili peppers

raw, dried, smoked,

in sauces, and even in candy.

It's estimated that the average Mexican

consumes over 34 pounds of hot peppers each year.

♪

Here in Oaxaca, a hotbed of Mexican cuisine,

the hot pepper is king.

♪

This is also where Araceli,

an ethnobotanist, does her research.

(man) What's the special relationship

between Mexicans and chili peppers?

And chili peppers?

♪

♪

♪

(bag rustling)

(Araceli sneezes)

(man) It doesn't bother you?

(serene guitar music)

♪

(narrator) From generation to generation,

this simple plant has taken root

deep into the culture

and lifestyle of the people of Mexico.

♪

Nearly every little village

has its own special relationship,

as is the case here in Agua Blanca

where the pasilla pepper is prized

for its incomparable smoky flavor.

♪

(man) Where are you getting your seeds from?

(peppers rustling)

(Manuel conversing with boy in Spanish)

(peppers plopping into water)

(chickens clucking)

(crickets chirping)

(wood hitting stone)

(bright music)

♪

(narrator) The aroma, the flavor,

the heat.

Each person has their own reason

for falling under the spell of the chili pepper.

In the kitchen of Aurora Toledo Martinez,

the chili enjoys a nearly divine level of reverence.

(pot sizzling)

♪

(sniffing)

Mmm!

(chilies rustling)

(peppers rustling)

(stone grinding peppers)

(pot bubbling)

(upbeat music)

♪

♪

(children laughing)

♪

♪

(Aurora laughs)

♪

(birds chirping)

(narrator) While the hot chili pepper

quickly dominated South and Central America,

it encountered resistance when moving north,

where local preferences leaned

to a more bland cuisine.

But eventually, about 150 years ago,

a little pepper with Mexican origins

somehow took the attention

of American banker and businessman

Edmund McIlhenny.

Edmund was so taken with the chili

that he started a new business

making it into a sauce

that he sold under the name of the pepper:

Tabasco.

(whimsical music)

♪

(Shane) The mashed-up peppers

ages in these white oak barrels

for up to three years,

and is then blended with vinegar,

strained of the skins and seeds, and bottled.

We're actually not sure how Edmund McIlhenny came up

with the recipe for Tabasco sauce

or where he got the peppers from.

One of his children said,

"Oh, Father got the peppers

from a Mexican-American War veteran who came back

to the U.S. from Mexico

through the Port of New Orleans."

♪

(machine whirring)

♪

We're in the factory where

all of the bottling of Tabasco sauce goes on.

It's still the same three ingredients that we use:

salt, pepper, and vinegar.

What has changed is the scale

on which we make the sauce.

No matter where you are in the world,

if you see a bottle of Tabasco sauce

on the table, it came from here,

because we only bottle and label

here on Avery Island, Louisiana,

and then we ship it out all around the world.

♪

We generally bottle

700,000 to 750,000 bottles per day,

that's the average

that we export to over 195 countries and territories

around the world

and label in 25 languages and dialects.

♪

Edmund McIlhenny, the inventor of Tabasco,

from 1868 to his death in 1890,

he made about 350,000 bottles of sauce,

so we make about twice as much in a single day

as he made in his entire career.

(horn honking)

(peaceful music)

♪

(men conversing in Spanish)

♪

(narrator) Today, the hot chili pepper

has a firm hold on a good portion

of the American culinary culture.

♪

Each year, workers in the desert pepper fields

of New Mexico harvest thousands of tons

of hot peppers for market.

♪

(rustling)

♪

(peppers hitting conveyor belt)

The estimated $50 million business in the state

led the little town of Hatch to declare itself

"The Chile Capital of the World."

♪

Darren Gillis is one of the region's

biggest pepper producers.

♪

(Darren) On this family farm,

my grandpa started growing chili

and then we've been carrying it on

all the way down through the years.

Oh, it took me a little while,

actually, I was a teenager probably

before I started really liking it, so.

And as I get older, the more I like it

and the hotter I like it, so.

(laughing)

It's kind of a taste that grows on you.

I like green better,

but I eat green and red both

but I prefer to have green chilies.

It's for the flavor.

(crunching)

(leaves rustling)

The varieties we've grown here

have been produced in New Mexico,

and the genetics on them have been converted

to fit this part of the country a lot better,

to improve the yields

and the size and shape and heat levels of it.

(tractor engine rumbling)

(leaves rustling)

(Darren) People are picking, they pick in buckets,

and then they carry the buckets up to the conveyer belt

and they dump them, and when they dump them,

they get paid a token or a pisha.

(footsteps)

And the people, at the end of the day,

they count their pishas

and they get paid by the bucket,

so the faster they pick,

the more money they can make,

so it gets pretty competitive at times.

(men cheering)

(peppers falling onto conveyer belt)

(man laughing)

(Darren) A normal year, we do between 6,000 and 7,000 tons,

and as time goes on,

the demand for Hatch chilies is growing,

our word is spreading

further and further out,

so we have people calling us

from all over the United States now

wanting Hatch chili.

♪

(fabric rustling)

(footsteps)

♪

(wire hangers clicking)

(footsteps)

♪

(Dave) My name is Dave DeWitt

and I'm called "The Pope of Peppers."

I was resistant to that for a while,

thinking maybe that Catholics would get upset with me,

but I found that that was not true.

When I visited Italy,

the headlines of the newspapers in Italy:

"Il Papa Del Peperoncino."

So, I'd just go, "Okay, they want to call me that,

I don't care."

I'm used to it now, it doesn't matter.

Call me what you want, but spell my name right.

♪

I lived in Virginia.

They'd never even heard of chili peppers before.

(bird chirping)

Once I moved to New Mexico,

I was amazed to see

that the people were eating chili peppers

on a daily basis.

These roasted chilies are caramelized,

so they have a higher sugar content,

so the flavor will be excellent.

And they'll also have sort of

a smoky flavor to them from the flames.

(peppers falling down chute)

I started studying up on New Mexico food and travel,

and you can't write about New Mexico food

without writing about chili peppers,

and the more I learned about them

and the more I wrote about them, it became my niche.

So just to prove that I always carry chili peppers with me,

I'm going to reach into my pocket

and pull out my car keys.

Attached to my car keys

is this little metal screw cylinder.

I carry this red chili powder in here,

it's half filled with red chili powder,

and if I come to a place where I need to heat up some food,

I have it right here.

(footsteps)

(man) So that's your office?

(Dave) Yeah, I do all my work in here.

And you can see that I have, you know,

pretty extensive library of various things.

This was my best-selling book, "The Whole Chile Pepper Book."

Sold about 120,000 copies in 10 years, publication.

And, uh, but I don't think it's my best book.

I think my best book is here.

This is "Precious Cargo:

How Foods From the Americas Changed the World."

Not only chili peppers but all different kinds

of New World crops and how they influenced

the cuisines of the Old World and changed them radically,

like tomatoes in Italy, for example.

It was a real change for them.

In the early days,

nobody knew what the chili peppers were,

and there was no other term other than "pimento"

to describe them.

And so not only did chili peppers get confused

with black pepper,

American Indians got confused with the Indians from India.

Black peppers was expensive.

It was a form of currency back in the day.

Then, chili peppers came along.

It was less expensive than black pepper.

And you could get, you know,

the heat from the chili pepper and the flavor,

and it becomes not just a spice but a food as well as a spice.

So when Columbus got to the New World,

and especially parts of Mexico and the Caribbean,

this was something brand new.

And the Portuguese and the Spanish

would take the chilies that were being grown

and introduce them everywhere that they went.

And within a hundred years

after he brought chili peppers to Spain,

they had completely encircled the world.

When you start adding all this up,

you get a picture of how trade and globalism,

if you want to put it that way,

has really changed the cuisines of these different countries.

And so China is the largest producer

of fresh chili peppers in the world.

India is the largest producer

of dried chili peppers in the world.

(sheep bleating)

(soft music)

(narrator) The chili made its way to Asia by the 17th century,

where again it would permeate the culture

and alter the cuisine.

♪

In fact, so many people now crave hot peppers worldwide

that it's even overtaken black pepper spice

in global popularity.

(indistinct chatter)

Here in Rajasthan, India,

the demand for hot chilies continues to grow each season,

much to the delight of local producers.

♪

(man) What's so special about Rajasthan pepper?

(truck creaks)

(bag thuds)

(birds chirping)

(indistinct chatter)

(peppers rustling)

(soft music)

♪

♪

(energetic music)

(traffic sounds)

♪

(narrator) To discover just how profoundly the little hot pepper

has made roads into the incredibly varied world

of Indian cooking,

we seek the guidance of author

and renowned New Delhi chef Ruchira Hoon.

♪

(soft music)

(indistinct chatter)

♪

(Ruchira) So we are at this 90-year-old market

called Gadodia Market in New Delhi.

It's the place which sells dry fruit and chili and spices.

It's one of the largest markets in Asia.

There were over 200 varieties of chili peppers in India,

of which 20, 26 are actually alive and kicking at the moment.

The funny thing is, the name for the chili pepper

is lal mirchi, or mirch,

which could mean "spice" and it could mean "heat."

Heat has always been a very integral part of Indian food.

Ginger, of course, has been one heat.

There's been the black pepper or the kaalee mirch.

The chili pepper, however,

because it was introduced more recently,

has been embraced more lovingly.

(lighter clicks)

(burner hissing softly)

In Indian cooking, chili pepper is also looked as a spice.

It'll temper.

That is truly a very Indian thing to do,

which is that you just heat a little oil

and put in a little bit of, you know,

either mustard seed or cumin seeds

or curry leaves and some of the chili.

It's to add flavor to whatever you're adding.

It's that extra bit that you're doing to that dish.

(utensil scraping pan)

In my cooking, the pepper aroma is very strong.

I think the taste is--

it speaks more volume in taste than in the flavor.

(utensil scraping pan)

(utensil scraping bowl)

(spice gently pattering)

It's called laal maas, which means red meat,

but red from the chilies because it only uses red chilies,

because it would last the longest.

And it also acts like a preservative.

And then whatever meat was found would be laal maas.

(utensil scraping pan)

I can't think of cooking without chili peppers.

I mean, I'd like to believe

that it was like a missing ingredient for Indian cooking,

because when I track back,

or when I do any research on any part of India,

chili peppers just sort of are a given in any recipe.

You know, it's the ingredient that you've got to have.

(utensil rattles)

(soft, quirky music)

♪

(narrator) Over a century ago,

the hot chili had spread to every continent,

had influenced every cuisine.

It seemed it had nowhere left to go.

Nowhere except hotter.

♪

(Wendy) Back in 2004,

we were contacted by some of our colleagues

at a research institute in Assam, India.

And they had let us know

that they had this very, very hot chili,

and if we wouldn't mind doing some research on it.

So they sent us some seed.

And we grew it out

and did the scientific replicated trials,

took the data,

statistically analyzed that data to get true facts.

(machine whirring)

♪

(narrator) To measure the rising stakes

in what would become a war for the hottest pepper,

science uses the Scoville scale,

named for American chemist Wilbur Scoville.

(liquid sloshing)

The scale he created is based on the concept

of diluting a hot pepper source with sugar water

until the sensation of burning is completely eliminated.

♪

The more dilution required,

the higher the Scoville score would be.

(contented sigh)

Based on this theory,

a jalapeño pepper scores a 5,000.

A habanero pepper hits 300,000.

And the pepper spray used by riot police

tops out at two million Scoville units.

♪

(Wendy) So the very first time I ever tasted

the bhut jolokia, or the ghost pepper,

I didn't feel the heat right away.

And I started to feel it in my throat.

And then it kept building.

Every 30 seconds that went by,

it built more and more and more

and got hotter and hotter.

When we ran the heat,

this came out just over one million Scoville heat units.

♪

(Dave) We were convinced that it was a fake,

that somebody had rigged the tests

and that they were fake.

We just couldn't believe there could be a chili pepper

that was a million Scoville heat units.

The question was,

how did this pepper get to India?

I was doing searches on Google Books,

Encyclopedia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia,

published in Madras in 1871.

And the quote that came up was,

"One species was called devil's pepper,

introduced by Lord Harris from Trinidad,

is so intensely hot

that the natives can hardly manage to use it."

And Lord Harris, he was the British governor

of the territory of Trinidad,

and he was a supporter of the Royal Botanic station there.

And then, Lord Harris got a promotion.

Instead of governor of little old Trinidad,

he became governor of Madras, India.

And he took those superhot seeds with him to India,

and that's where the bhut jolokia came from.

(bright music)

(Wendy) In 2006,

the Chile Pepper Institute

got the bhut jolokia, or the ghost pepper,

in the Guinness Book of World Records

as the hottest chili pepper on the planet.

We had no idea that we were opening Pandora's box.

It literally turned into Pandora's box.

And we, oh, gosh,

fielded thousands of questions and inquiries

and did hundreds of interviews.

And really just for probably about five years,

it was a big thing.

(bright music)

♪

(narrator) The declaration of a world's record rang out like a shot,

starting a battle that would turn into a global war

for hot pepper domination.

♪

Among those to rise up to the challenge

was the tiny island nation of Trinidad and Tobago,

who believed that they could not be defeated.

♪

(bag rustling)

(Pathmanathan) Trinidad peppers have always enjoyed a reputation,

because they combine the pungency

with a really beautiful flavor profile.

So they give the better of two worlds.

(footsteps, bushes rustling)

(birds chirping)

The peppers in the Caribbean

are referred to as Capsicum chinense,

which is different from the chili peppers from Mexico.

There's five domesticated species of peppers.

I don't think any of them will be as hot as chinense.

Chinense is the king of hotness.

(laughs)

It is very well possible that, you know,

we have had some mutations or selection

for hot peppers in Trinidad.

I think the biggest surprise

was when we collected the Scorpion.

Farmer said it was the hottest pepper

that he has seen, ever seen.

And the students used to tell me that when they cut open

the Scorpion to take the seeds,

they have to put both their hands in ice water

in the night to sleep,

because the whole hand burns, you know?

It was above anything that was documented at that time.

It was not popular, nobody knew about it.

But once it was characterized

and it went into the Guinness Book of Records, you know,

everybody wanted to have-- have it.

(soft, pensive music)

♪

(leaves rustling)

♪

(Sharon) We've always been doing pepper sauce at home,

and I was looking to become an entrepreneur

and start my own business.

♪

The same time when I did,

the Trinidad Scorpion became named

the hottest pepper in the world.

And it was also the same time I was starting my business,

so it got really exciting,

'cause people were now challenging me

to do a hot--a hot pepper sauce, a Scorpion.

And I'm like, "I'm not sure there's a market for this pepper

'cause it's so hot."

♪

So it is believed that this pepper

is a strain of the pimento pepper,

which is more of a seasoning pepper,

it's not--it's not hot.

And the 7 Pot pepper,

which is extremely hot but flavorless.

(bushes rustling)

We made a first batch and we launched it,

and to this day it's our number one selling product.

So what it told me

is that there is a huge market out there

and fan base for people who really like hot peppers.

(guitar music)

(narrator) By the beginning of the 2000s,

U.S.-based horticulturists had begun to tinker

with the genetics of the weapons-grade chilies

coming from the Caribbean.

(amplifier tuning)

Among them, Troy Primeaux,

whose work would become the focus

of a war within the war for the world's hottest pepper.

(guitar music)

(Troy) My true love is music.

The peppers started out as a consolation prize

for having to hang up my rock and roll boots.

♪

(blues music)

The Cajun people believe in peppers.

Everybody uses cayenne pepper in their dishes,

their rice and gravy, their gumbos, their étouffée.

♪

Back then, there were a couple of forums,

like the Hot Pepper Forum.

I was purchasing seeds and growing all these varieties,

you know, like, at one time I had 76 different varieties.

(pensive music)

♪

Traditional genetics, breeding,

it's not GMO,

but you're definitely creating something.

Because a pepper plant has both sex,

it will self-pollinate,

unless a bumblebee or an insect comes first.

And that's called cross-pollination.

So we're simulating that effect.

♪

I mean, it's kind of like assisted pepper love,

assistant pepper sex.

I did this in 2005.

This plant is a cross of the Naga Morich,

which is a precursor to the ghost chili,

everybody knows what the ghost-- bhut jolokia is.

And then you have the 7 Pot pepper from Trinidad,

which is rumored to heat seven pots of stew.

When I cross-bred the two,

yeah, it was different,

and it--it's just like it's magical

because you've created something

that's different than either parent,

and it's unique.

♪

Visual, just warty as hell.

Round.

Big stinger sticking out of it.

This is characteristic of my pepper,

most than anything.

With 1.5 million Scovilles,

but when somebody wants to pop one of these

in their mouth, I typically say, "Wait."

(laughs)

"Wait a little while and think about it," you know?

But this, and I have to explain,

this is like eating 300 jalapeños at one time.

That usually--

that's a deal-breaker for most people right there.

(utensil scraping dish)

Now, you have a namesake,

a pepper that's gonna outlive me,

but other people are growing it,

other people are using it in their products.

The minute the seed leaves the garden

and leaves your house, all bets are off.

And then I knew a matter of time,

somebody was gonna come around and beat me.

(seeds softly rattling)

(soft, bright music)

♪

(man) How many varieties are you growing?

(Ed) I believe it's 156 in here,

but I've been told I'm wrong.

(laughs)

Could be more.

♪

(narrator) Meanwhile, in South Carolina,

another shot was about to be fired

in the battle of the chiliheads.

(Ed) Welcome to the jungle, baby.

(chuckles)

♪

They're just so beautiful.

♪

It's a paternal relationship.

♪

Uh, I'm their dad.

♪

And I love watching my children grow.

♪

The way peppers affect me has more to do with my past.

I'm an addict, okay?

I started using drugs and alcohol at a very young age.

I also got into breeding a certain substance that, uh,

really wasn't legal at the time,

so we're gonna leave it at that,

but, uh, that really got me into plant genetics.

And peppers just added to the mix for me.

So, literally what I do is I take fine paintbrushes

and I take the pollen out of one flower

and transfer it over,

and do it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Most of the time it doesn't work,

but when it does work, it's magic.

A friend of mine that I knew at work

was from the island of Saint Vincent.

She went home for the holidays

and brought back a pepper.

I think it was more towards a 7 Pot

or maybe a 7 Pot habanero cross.

And I bred that with nine other peppers,

one of 'em being a Naga that I got from a doctor

who's from Pakistan.

And those two produced the Reaper.

(insects chirring)

(birds calling)

The Reaper is bright red, it's got wrinkles all over it,

with a tail sticking out of it.

(bright music)

"Congratulations, Edgar,

you've been awarded the Guinness World Record

for the hottest thing in the world,

Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper."

♪

We literally got so many orders

that we were sold out in like five days.

I couldn't keep up with production.

I think we had to refund something like 24,000 orders

over a three-month period 'cause we just couldn't keep up.

I was not prepared for the record

and I was not prepared for the notoriety

that it would give me.

♪

(Troy) I saw it and it looked just like my pepper.

In my soul, there was no pepper

with that long stinger that looked like that out there.

People rename peppers these days,

they'd done it then,

there's controversy with the Primo.

The first time I heard about Troy Primeaux

was right after that, uh,

right after that announcement.

There was a controversy.

Oh, is this a Primo, is it a Reaper?

And I got involved in the drama for a little bit, uh,

but I didn't see the point in it.

(Troy) We've had the Reaper and the Primo

tested at Las Cruces Bio Labs,

and they're nearly identical,

so much so that the manager said

in all the peppers he's tested in the industry,

in his opinion, they're the same.

(soft, pensive music)

(Ed) No one's come close to beating the Reaper yet.

I don't try to imitate anybody else out there.

I saw a market, I made a market, and I'm leading that market.

(peppers clattering)

There's just people who make money

actually keeping that controversy going.

♪

(Troy) In time, uh, the community,

the pepper community,

it was kind of like Ed and I were having a divorce

and the kids didn't want to hear the parents fight.

It wasn't good for business.

Um, I backed off.

And what's happened since I backed off,

I--I sell hot sauce to Reaper fans

as well as Primo fans.

(traffic whirring)

I'm gonna be the empire of the superhot probably.

Humans are crazy, you know?

We'll eat the silliest things just because we're humans.

They're just chasing a dragon too.

Okay, someone get me a lawyer and a last will.

(indistinct chatter)

Oh my God.

(announcer) Three, two, one.

Eat!

(indistinct chatter, cheering)

(narrator) For now, the Carolina Reaper

still holds the crown for the world's hottest pepper.

(indistinct announcements)

And an army of chiliheads await the next contender.

(announcer) Please give these guys a big Fort Mill cheer.

(Dave) Everybody wants the biggest, the best,

the hottest, the ultimate.

I just think that we have an unstoppable force here.

(soft, pensive music)

Foods from the Americas changed the world,

but cuisines are all about change,

and they're still evolving.

All over the world cuisines are evolving.

♪

(Katherine) At the end of the day, they are seeds,

but they tell a story.

They tell a story of human engagements, human travel.

And so, through doing things like that,

they're maintaining a lot of the biodiversity

and that plasticity of the chili pepper genetics,

allowing for it to continue to surprise us

in so many different ways.

(bright music)

(indistinct chatter)

♪

(Ivette) Sometimes I wonder if we are in control

or if maybe the plants are in control.

I think chilies are using us, you know,

to--to help them spread their genes

and pollinate and keep working with their genes.

Um, I think, really, we're just puppets of chilies

trying to, you know, get us more addicted to them,

and that's what's going on.

(laughing)

♪

(Troy) Maybe the chili knew all along

that humans would develop a liking for it,

and that that was the goal.

It's got the last laugh.

I mean, it's all over the place.

(utensil hitting bowl)

(narrator) Did the pepper choose us?

Or did we create the hot chili in our own image,

excessive and without limits?

(cheering, applause)

Does the chili pepper hold the key

to our own inner duality,

the line between pleasure and pain?

One thing is certain,

the chili pepper will continue to inspire great passion,

just like a forbidden fruit.

(leaves rustling)

(Troy) This Pot's special,

definitely Adam's apple, forbidden fruit.

Were we supposed to eat it?

(man) Well, you tell me.

(Troy) You might have to ask it.

(insects chirring)

(bright music)

♪

(bright music)