When I order dishes with hot pepper logos next to it, I would first pay attention to how many pepper logos deplayed, then read about the ingredients used to make the dish, then be stuck with the ultimate question: "Is this much spice something I can handle". Now, I take pride at my origin of birth -- a place far far away embedded in hot chilli peppers. People in my town ate spicy food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Rarely do you see resturants that serves absolutely no spicy dishes.
After I came to the states, I shockingly realized that spicy food is not everything. Indeed, spicy food was looked negatively upon. Well, despite people's resentment towards spicy foods for its ability to cause regurgitation of food through the esophageal sphincter to the esophagus and casing esophagus cancer (sometimes mistaken as heart burn), I still cannot live without it.
Through talking with my family did I realize that there is something called the Scoville scale, a scale that measures the amount of capsaicin within a pepper. Wikipedia listed a very nice table with peppers with different scoville levels. The only pepper that I was familiar with was Jalapeno pepper, Gochujang, Banana pepper, and bell pepper. All of those peppers were less then 10,000 scoville units. Thess facts destroyed my pride in eating spicy food, instead, it made me feel worrysome towards people who eats Naga Viper pepper or Bhut Jolokia on a daily basis.
But back to my original concern of how much spicy can I really handle, maybe around 5,000 scoville scale and nothing more.
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