Hungry Planet

-[pepper crunches] -[observer laughs] [laughing] I see it now.

Cool.

Spicy peppers can make your tastebuds scream with joy or with fright.

I don't even want it on my tongue.

The spice literally triggers a mild defense response in your body.

That's why it can cause sweating, sniffling, and even crying.

[laughing] Why?

Peppers show up in cuisine across the world, like New Mexican hatch chilies or potent tiny Thai peppers, or sweet and fruity Indian Kashmiri peppers.

And if you, like me, love spicy peppers, you might be familiar with the Scoville scale for ranking these peppers.

But you'd be surprised at how it's been calculated.

Hot peppers also hold solutions to problems facing small farmers, from labor shortages to finding community in a new country halfway around the world.

Welcome to "Hungry Planet."

This one's going to be spicy, so let's dig in.

OMG, it smells so good, though.

Oops.

We're at the Chili Pepper Institute, the only nonprofit in the world solely devoted to education and research on chili peppers.

And this is Danise Coon, a senior research specialist at the institute at New Mexico State University.

She's been working on chili peppers for over 30 years.

There are literally thousands of different varieties of chili pepper.

Chili peppers cross pollinate really easily, so you can literally get like a new variety within a couple of years.

I've probably worked with-- oh my gosh, this is going to be crazy-- probably about 8,000 different varieties of chilies, including the really amazing wild ones.

So the main peppers that we do our research on are called New Mexican types.

They were developed by Dr. Fabian Garcia, who was the first director of the Ag Experiment Station here at NMSU, back in the early 1900s.

He wanted to create a pepper that was easier for people to grow, had more yield, and so he took some of the chilies from Mexico and the chilies from the like the native chilies of New Mexico that were being grown in the pueblos and hybridized them and came up with something called New Mexico Number Nine.

It was larger, had thicker walls, less heat, and went from green to red, and that was perfect for the industry.

(Niba) Every day, about a quarter of the humans on this planet eat chili peppers.

So the demand is high.

And they're also a high-value crop, meaning they can be economically beneficial to small farmers.

But, they are really difficult to harvest.

(Danise) Some of the research that we're doing is mechanization of chili peppers.

That kind of helps our processors when there's either a labor shortage or labor is too expensive.

Sounds like most chili peppers are harvested by hand, right?

Correct.

Most chili peppers are-- especially the New Mexican type chili peppers, are harvested by hand.

So that whole labor-intensive process becomes an issue.

(speaker) So, the red chili industry, most of the chili peppers go into a dried ground product.

So red chili peppers have been mechanically harvested for some time.

They can take some abuse, they can take some damage; they're going to be dried and ground anyway.

Our green chilies, however, are mainly peeled and then they're processed, either hand frozen or sold direct market.

And just because they're more gentle, and if you damage a green chili pepper, you reduce its quality, yield, and value to the consumer.

So if you go through with a mechanical harvester, you have to be really concerned about how much damage the peppers are sustaining.

For peppers to be harvested mechanically, they need to have three things-- a strong central stock that can resist being destroyed by a machine; a stem that can be easily popped out of the pepper; and all the peppers need to be ready at the same time, also known as uniform ripening.

(Dr. Walker) With NuMex Odyssey, the problem was we couldn't get the pedicels off.

So, what I did is I actually crossed it with another line that had easy pedicel removal.

We developed breeding lines that are very high-yielding very, very vigorous.

And we put those in several years of replicated trials, field trials, with the machine that we identified as being the best machine to mechanically harvest New Mexico type green chile.

And out of that, we started with about 30 different breeding lines, and it came down to NuMex Odyssey, being the best.

(Niba) The scientists at the Chili Pepper Institute are working to make peppers easier to harvest for farmers.

And meanwhile, across the country, an organization is working with refugee farmers to grow their familiar foods in new soil.

(speaker) Transplanting Traditions is a community farm.

It's like an incubator farm for refugees from Burma.

(Niba) Ree Ree Wei is the executive director of Transplanting Traditions, an organization that gives refugee farmers small farm plots to provide a cultural community space.

(Ree Ree) We started out as like two acres, and now we're at eight acres and doing all kinds of agriculture education, food access program, and also just like youth and children development programs.

And it all centers around food justice.

Like, how do we preserve our food?

How do we like, preserve our ingredients?

(Niba) For the people who love them, chili peppers often hold an important role in their cuisine and in their culture.

(Ree Ree) Chili pepper is like an addiction.

You need to have this flavor to feel satisfied.

People would mash up the chili.

They'll put it with shrimp paste, salt and lime, and make chili out of it.

The Roselle is like the hibiscus plant, and they'll whip that until it becomes a paste and then after that, they'll just put chili in it.

Hmm.

I'm hungry now.

The farmers at Transplanting Traditions were successful farmers in Burma, but they often need to adapt their practices in the new environment of North America.

(Ree Ree) How do we teach these farmers about cultivating on American soil?

How do you farm during the cold time?

How do you treat and manage pests and diseases?

Now they expanded their grown practices into like growing American produce.

However, they also like continue to grow Asian produce.

There was one point where we had almost like 100 of variety of Asian produce that is being grown just to eat or to sell.

We really are trying to help them increase their income.

On the flip side is then we provide the education.

Along with that we provide technical assistance.

We'll be like, this farmer can come up to us like "Hey, this is what's happening with my crop.

Why is this?"

It's very different from other agriculture programs.

And like just farming, it could be a job for them.

It's also like, this is who we are, we are farming people.

(Niba) I love spicy food, and spice comes from the molecule capsaicin.

In chili peppers, capsaicin is found only in the placenta or ribs of the pepper, not in the main flesh or the seed.

(Danise) So, we have a few different varieties that we grow in New Mexico.

I think our main most popular and culturally immersed pepper is the New Mexican type chili pepper.

That's this guy right here.

They're like a long green that turns to red.

We use them in both stages.

And this is the bulk of our industry here in New Mexico.

When you taste this, hopefully you will be able to taste some earthiness.

Almost a little bit of a grassy like bell pepper, but then you're going to get like a sweetness that comes in.

So so feel free.

I don't know how hot this one is.

(Niba) When you bite into a pepper and that capsaicin is released, it binds onto receptors in your tongue and starts a cascade of signaling in your body.

That then tells your brain that a painful or hot irritant is in your mouth.

Your body starts a mild defense response that some people find enjoyable.

There are lots of different theories as to why some people like spicy foods more than others.

There may even be genetic and personality traits involved.

-[crunching] -[Danise laughing] I see it now.

Cool.

So this is the Thai Pepper and...

This one I know is gonna be spicy.

Yeah, so definitely get him at the tip.

Can you do this one with me for moral support?

Absolutely.

Alright.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Okay, so the interesting thing about Asian type chilies, is they come on very quickly, very intensely, but they're supposed to dissipate very quickly.

So hopefully we'll get some dissipating.

We can eat some more of the sweet ones to kind of get some heat to go away.

But definitely probably on the hotter end of the scale, I would say this one is probably about 20,000 Scoville units.

So a German scientist by the name of Wilbur Scoville invented this in the early 1950s.

He needed something that was going to do the varying range of heat in chili peppers.

And so he took human test subjects and didn't organoleptic test where they would test a chili sample.

If they felt heat, he would then dilute it with a sugar water sample.

And every dilution is one Scoville heat unit.

So it was very subjective because everyone's tastebuds are different.

And so now, today, since we're more technologically advanced, we use high-performance liquid chromatography.

And the machine actually takes the sample of pepper in it and and sees the individual capsaicinoids, counts them, and throws them out in parts per million.

We then take that parts per million and put it in a little formula and then we get Scoville Heat Units.

So, much, much, much more accurate, not as subjective.

Our director Alex really hates spice, so I really want her to try these ones.

Alex, do you want to try this?

(Alex) I mean, I don't but I will.

Here, you can have one that has the tip still on it, so that way you will survive.

-Okay.

-I believe in you.

-That was that was-- -So brave!

That was so much bolder than I have ever been!

Would you like some milk?!

-[both laughing] -She looks-- Yeah, she went she went for half-- Okay, here's the comparison.

Danise had this much.

Alex had this much!

Why?

-That sucks.

-[all laughing] (Niba) You got this, Taylor.

Oh!

Full set.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-[all laughing] It's radiating!

(Alex) Cause for the first second you're like, "I got this!"

(Taylor) Ahh I swallowed!

[all laughing] -I'm good.

-You good?

(Niba) You want to try the cherry one?

I'm good.

Those are just cherry tomatoes.

This is the most delightful.

All right.

Cut.

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