This article seems to conflate "spice ingredients" with spicy ingredients. I would have a hard time considering how food from cuisines that use (e.g.) aniseed, caraway, cardamom or poppy seed could be considered "spicy food".
It also discusses “mean number of spice ingredients per recipe,” which is absurd. For example, lots of moles are not very spicy but have a lot of spice ingredients, including many kinds of chili peppers.
Mean annual temperature also seems like the wrong thing to consider. The temperature ranges seem more important.
I had this distinction between “spicy” and “spiced” pointed out to me by a former colleague. In my experience, “spicy” is used when there is heat/capsaicin involved and “spice” is used when there is only flavor. I think it is a cause for confusion for many people.
That's why, when I need to be clear about it, I say spicy hot (because hot in itself is also rather ambiguous) and uses a lot of spices when describing something that is rather more flavorful.
English is just not very good at describing flavor. Looking at British food, there might never have been the necessity.
In German there's scharf (spicy) and pikant (slightly spicy). As well as würzig (spiced).
What a bizarre classification: unusually specific in some instances, and enormously vague in others - Mughlai vs. South Indian. South Indian food contains a lot of variety - from coastal Andhra, to Chettinad style, to Kerala food, Mysore, Udupi cuisine, and Hyderabad-style, all have varied levels of spices, some South Indian cuisine is spicier than Rajasthani cuisine, for sure.
But on a more pertinent note - it may be something historical - you need to spice up the food a little to disguise slightly stale food. Historically, a lot of the present spices like black pepper, cardamom and cinnamon also came from places like Kerala, Sri Lanka and Malaysia which were very close to the equator. No wonder it affected the food there.
Another theory could be that a lot of Indians are vegetarian and spices make vegetarian foods more palatable. You could eat most meats with only a dash of salt; however vegetarian dishes need to pair spices with the vegetables to make them appealing.
North of Europe used horseradish as the closer substitute.
Some notes:
1) The results depend on how we define spice. Many European countries use cheese to add interesting flavors to the food. Other parts of the world are more lactose intolerant and probably use spices where the west would simply use some type of cheese. A lot of berries dried or fresh could also play that role. Black currants could be easily included among spices for this purpose.
3) As a general rule, the poorest the diet, the more spices will include. If you basically eat rice each day, you will crave for something able to add a different taste each day
4) Places with more biodiversity have more choices. Small forests in Tropical areas have twenty times more tree species that entire countries in Europe so the number of possible sources of flavor is much higher.
Well, until I read this comment thread, I wasn't aware that there was an ambiguity with that, either. "Spice" is synonymous with "spices".
I thought the ambiguity was the difference between "spicy" and "spiced", where people often use "spicy" to mean "hot", and "spiced" to mean "contains spices", but not necessarily hot.
Now that I'm aware that others find ambiguity, I have nothing I can say about it because this is new information to me. I suppose it's up to them to define it!
If you read to the end of the article, it seems the study is looking at spice use more broadly and not so much spicyness (ie. heat) specifically. That would explain why east African food that is influenced by spice trade with India ranks so high on the scale compared to west African food.
While the chili peppers originated in the New World the fact remains that they grow better in Asia than in Norway which is what people mean by 'local food's in this context.
It also ignores things like shifts in culture, such as some European aristocracies deciding that food with lots of “spices” (herbs and such) was a “vulgar” thing commoners did, as a method of signaling their class, which gradually effected commoner behavior.
My family origin is Pahari farmers. In winters, my ancestral town's temperatures fall below freezing, yet Chili Powder from our region is a staple in most North Indian cooking (Kashmiri Mirch grown in JK and Himachal).
That Punjab and Mughlai trendline can be attributed to that reason - Kashmiri Mirch is a staple in both styles of cooking now, but if you look at "pind style" cooking, it's way less spicy. A traditional Kadhi, Saag, or Choley isn't going to be spicy but might have 1 Kashmiri Mirch added as a garnish.
Peppers only came to our portion of the Himalayas in the 18th and 19th century (hence why Bell Peppers are called "Shimla Mirch" - it was brought by the Brits), but became a popular commodity to sell due to high margins and easy to grow in small plots, which is important in JK and Himachal as land reform laws capped agricultural plots to 3 acres at most.
Also treating "South Indian" as a single cuisine group is a travesty.
This isn't a thing, and reminds me how 'steamed hams' is also a regional food. They're making up stuff and going along with whatever just to get clicks.
Original paper: There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk
Original paper's conclusion: ...not explained by temperature and that spice use cannot be accounted for by diversity of cultures, plants, crops or naturally occurring spices. Patterns of spice use are not consistent with an infection-mitigation mechanism, but are part of a broader association between spice, health, and poverty.
I wonder how they chose which countries to include in the graph. A lot of my family's Venezuelan and have 0 spice tolerance whatsoever despite growing up near the equator.
They also seem to be ranking things per recipe rather than per unit of food eaten by the population, if you read the abstract. Even if there are 9 spicy recipes and 1 bland recipe in a country, if the 1 bland recipe is eaten every day, doesn't that just show that there are more spicy varieties of dishes?
The explanation that I was working with was that in hotter climates food spoils faster so spiciness can slow or mask the process. The article says:
> The researchers suggest other explanations for why people in hot countries tend to eat spicier food. One possibility is that it’s because spices help preserve food in hot climates. Another is that people in hot countries have developed a taste for spicy food because it helps them cool down.
This may be part of it. Even now in Thailand "fresh" (I use that term very loosely) meat bought from a supermarket can have wildly different times before it has an odour, and that's without considering the wet markets where everything is out in the open air relying on a block of ice to keep it "fresh".
TLDR: Don't trust this paper as meaningful, it's meant only as a tentative step towards something which may be meaningful.
They put Alabama and New Mexico in the same category? Even when the latter has "red or green [chile]" as the official state question, and has a very different environment due to being in the high desert?
And all of South Africa into a single category? The supplementary materials say "For South Africa in the B&S dataset1, the cookbooks from which the recipes were derived are written by Afrikaans-speaking authors8, so we have used the Afrikaans language to represent this cuisine." but that is only one of many cultures in South Africa, including a large Indian population with spicy food.
This makes me regard the paper with a wary eye.
Ohhh! All of the peer reviews are published! See "Peer Review Information" at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01039-8 . It took a while to get this paper through, with lots of comments about issues.
Reviewer #1, after giving the okay, points out:
"I am aware this was a limitation of the sources upon which the study relied, and that similar biases were present in previous work, and this does not undermine the study overall because it is a “tenative step” towards better understanding, but please make this a very clear and strong caveat in the discussion and conclusions. It may also be leading to the rather odd correlation between GDP and spiciness which I refer to above."
where that correlation above is:
"the rather limited global sampling (see below) may also be playing a role here. For example, off the cuff, adding in say Singapore (which I imagine might have spicy food and be rich) and Nicaragua (which has rather bland food but is poor) could make a difference…I would not suggest the authors try to expand their sample (unless very straightfoward), but please at least discuss this possibility."
