Mr. Chilehead: Adventures in the Taste of Pain

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“Of course, once you take a hit of the lush and lovely habaсero,
you’ll find it very difficult to stop there. It’s very much like
sex. The other ingredients in a pepper dish are like Victoria’s Secret
lingerie: you’ll dispense with them quickly. Enough is never enough
when it comes to pepper. One hit, as any crack addict will attest, just
won’t do. The hot pepper is not an opiate, but it might as well be.
One endorphin rush leads to another, and soon the pepper takes on a
larger-than-life significance ... Hashish might bring on the munchies,
but the pepper does, too, and it pulls no ‘punchies.’”

The above excerpt is from the first chapter, “Genesis of a
Chilehead.” If you liked what you read, then buy this book. If you did
not, then you had better move on, because Mr. Chilehead contains more
than 200 pages of paragraphs just like it. It is hard to say what
exactly is wrong. The text is wordy without being very informative,
silly without being funny, and sometimes just plain gross. Other
chapters include “Short Takes on the Saga of the Chile Pepper,”
“Howdy Ms. Habaсero (aka Mademoiselle Hellfire),” “Condiment
Magma Made and Marketed in America,” “Dave’s Insanity: An
Evangelical Hot-Sauce Maker’s Jihad,” “Sauce Assisted Suicide,”
and “Erotomania in Painland: Sauce Sanctuary for the Sex-craved and
Politically Incorrect.” Following the text are five appendixes, a
short selection of recipes, a list of selected web pages, and a sources
list for seeds.