Fruits, and by extension peppers, evolved to be eaten. Peppers are the fruit of the pepper plant, and generally speaking, fruits act as an enticement for animals to eat them and thus distribute their seeds.
It’s just that hot peppers specifically appear to have evolved a strategy to dissuade mammals from eating them, since the chemical that causes them to be hot primarily affects mammals, but not birds. It’s actually not an uncommon strategy, many fruits are distasteful or even poisonous to certain animals, but are perfectly edible to other animals in a way that suggests it is specifically beneficial to be eaten by some but not by others.
Fun fact: some fruit evolved to be eaten by mega fauna, giant animals, that no longer exist because uh we ate them. One of those is Avocado. A pit that is way too big to be eaten by fauna of current day size.
Except elephants!
im glad someone addressed it
No Elephants in South America, where the Avocado evolved.
Have you ever done butt stuff after too many chilies the night before?
Spicy dick was not a fun time, I had to put it in a glass of milk for a while.
Icy hot will fix that right up
Hey you can’t trick me into putting Icy Hot on a Q-tip down my dick hole again.
That’s why you should use Mineral Ice.
I’ve heard the argument that the evolution of our ability to enjoy such things benefits both that pungent plant as well as us. By eating such things, we propagate them better. But the kind of insects and animals that would otherwise eat them wouldn’t assist propagation. So the plants evolved to both repel the disadvantageous eaters and attract the advantageous eater by the same method.
I kinda think that falls apart with horseradish though. Afaik, humans don’t spread anything directly with that. We can cultivate it, which helps the plant, but that’s not the same action as digging up garlic, eating some, and spreading the cloves, or the seeds from peppers. That puts a hole in this specific set of plants with that idea.
Peppers are that way because birds don’t taste the hotness and they spread seeds further than other animals. I guess humans spread seeds even further as you can get them shipped from another continent really easily. Although birds also fly those distances, they poop more frequently.
Humans also are really bad at returning digested seeds to the environment. Unlike all other life we process our shit
I meant the purposeful spread by agriculture, not the natural way.
How do we propagate horseradish?
Kinda like potatoes, garlic, ginger, lots of plants. Dig it up, break of a chunk, eat the rest, replant chunk.
Or if the British are taking all of your food and there’s a fungal disease, dig it up, eat most, save some for next year’s crop, then eat some of that because starving, while British landlords insist their rights be upheld (and they be allowed to continue to take all other crop yields as rent) and British farmers insist no one be allowed to undercut their food prices that the peasants of Ireland can’t afford.
Growing my first horseradish plant this year. Do we not spread it around by breaking off chunks of root and sharing them around? Same as garlic, we’re taking pieces of root to grow more?
Garlic and onions are toxic to a lot of mammals.
Humans superpower is the ability to eat all this poisonous stuff.
So is caffeine. I feel pity for other animals.
Caffeine is mostly an insecticide. Luckily for us it’s a stimulant. Unluckily for many it’s physically addictive
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Birds laugh at your spicy peppers. My parrots LOVE to eat jalapenos and raw red Thai peppers. In the wild they eat them and spread/fertilize the seeds, so they don’t taste the spicyness.
Birds fly to avoid predators. Plants are spicy to avoid being consumed. Humans combined both defense mechanisms into hot wings and eat them as a treat.
Virgin mammal dorks vs Chad Aves connoisseurs
As a result they are bred in mass and dominate domestic agriculture. Long term strategy who knows but short term things are working out pretty ok I thinks.
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan is about this. It follows four plants- Tulips, Apples, Cannabis and Potatoes through the changes that they have been through as they trick us into domesticating them/we adjust their genetics to suit us. Spoiler: the chapter on Potatoes is largely about RoundUp Ready GMOs and how we are ruining the world so that McDonald’s can have long, beautiful french fries from one specific, blight prone variety and is really depressing (but still interesting!).
Humans are fucking terrifying.
Alien 1: so tell me about this new species you’ve found
Alien 2: well it’s in a kind of backwater planet of a backwater galaxy so they haven’t made contact with any other sentient species. Only one sentient species on the planet. Couple of almost-sentient though, but one has achieved dominance.
Alien 1: not uncommon. Tell me about them.
Alien 2: they’re terrifying.
Alien 1: really?
Alien 2: they breed and expand like a virus, taking over every geographic area they enter.
Alien 1: they have large litters of children then?
Alien 2: no, relatively few.
Alien 1: how do they take over–
Alien 2: they. kill. everything.
Alien 1: they wha–
Alien 2: they were responsible for multiple mass extinctions before they developed writing.
Alien 1: Oh my. How do they hunt?
Alien 2: They chase their prey.
Alien 1: Well, yes, but how?
Alien 2: They chase their prey until it drops from exhaustion. They do not stop.
Alien 1: Well that’s frightening.
Alien 2: Oh and they’re pack hunters.
Alien 1: That just got worse.
Alien 2: They managed to quickly discover all the poisonous plants and prey in their area.
Alien 1: Ah, so they’re intelli–
Alien 2: And they consumed them en masse.
Alien 1: …
Alien 2: for fun.
Alien 1: we should probably destroy their planet.
Alien 2: in self-defense.
