So Hot Right Now: Our Love Affair with Chips and Salsa

Fam, it’s come time to discuss what we talk about when we talk about chips and salsa. By chips, I mean tortilla chips. By salsa, I mean salsa.

I’m from Texas, which means two things: guns and a culture of profanity so deep and rich that I’m surprised no crazed oilman has thought to drill it. It’s hard to say. Perhaps they have; Texas history books cover only up until December 29, 1845, after which the Republic joined the United States, referred to as the “Y’all We Made a Mistake” age of history.

But if there were a third leg in the body of the Texas superbeast, it would be chips and salsa. Chips and salsa, or CS as people in the biz call it. (I have never been in the biz, nor have I ever been close to anyone who has winked at anyone who has ever been in the biz.)

CS isn’t so much a food as it is a way of life; really, the prime reason for going out to eat, and for much of what we call “life” as well. If you wonder why you haven’t simply left your children by the side of the Carl’s Jr. and hooked your pulsating main-veins to a pure, sweet opium feed for eternity … well, stop your wondering, citizen, because this is why. Delicious chips, and the pure golden pain-ticipation of salsa, help us hold onto all that is beautiful and living and delightful and playful and insert fifth adjective here, Reader.

Regarding CS, you probably have your own favorites. Mine come from two places. The first is from a little outfit called Rosa’s Cafe and Tortilla Factory. Rosa’s is a Mexican food restaurant chain which began in glorious West Texas, and has spread to the rest of the mundane world, including California. The second is another chain, Don Pablo’s, which is rarer, but equally my everything.

I assume you already know all about how corn chips work. If you don’t, you probably should leave.

Naw, just playing. But I daresay you should check yourself before you summarily and transcendentally Shrek yourself. What happens when Tortilla chips are made? You take corn, the king of New World foods. May its reign continue to be just and fruitful.

“What’s corn, Jason? What’s food, Jason?” Sit back and make peace with your ignorance of food staples as I unveil the mysteries of yesteryear to your astounded, unblinking eyes. Like a VH1 executive desperate to fill airtime, I’m going to remind you about a more “vintage” extreme era—the invasion of America by rapacious European pirates in the 15th century.

See, the conquistadors, before they all died from not eating enough gold, brought the word “torta” to refer to their cakes; the Mexicans borrowed the word to refer to their much better and woker food. Since the dawn of time, the Nations of Mexico had made ground corn pulp cakes, even after the Europeans wanted to make everything wheat, wheat, wheat. You can see where this is going.

When fried, these corn cakes, tortillas, can be broken into triangles, the universe’s most perfect three-cornered shape. “Try angles,” the name whispers. See? It’s there in the word. Chips basically sell themselves. Anything which is fried must in turn be combined with something else—it’s a natural law I call the Elvis Principle.

In the case of tortilla chips, that “something” is salsa. Salsa is a sauce made from tomatoes, and then various piquant additions. The Mayans invented it, which may explain why all salsa vanished forever from the earth after the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar in 2012. I’m just kidding, of course; professional Mayanist academics suggested the 2012 myth was a deep misunderstanding of Mayan culture and history.

CS keeps us all alive in some weird, indirect way which my science budget won’t allow me to investigate. The screamless void of space does not have CS, but this island Earth does. Think about that the next time you’re fighting your enemy for the last bucket of fancy dog treats at the CostCo. This fact alone—that we are a planet where Mexican food delights steer the ship of mortal goodness—ought to make us regard each other a little more sympathetically. Perhaps we should consider taking a daily 10-hour walk with our wives, husbands and various animal friends, instead of applauding like diseased marmots at the TV whenever a show containing graphic sex and violence comes on the old HBO.

The fact is, salsa is the trickier partner in this equation. Much like Lost or the career arc of Guns ‘n’ Roses, we adore it despite how it pains us. But why? It turns out we love salsa because it causes stinging in our mouth. Capsaicin and other similar chemical molecules in hot food play an all-hammer symphony on the pain receptors.

When you eat salsa, you’re not actually burning, but feel as if you are. The chemical processes which are triggered by eating the peppers in the sauce cause groovy chemicals to swarm like horse nightmares inside the thoughtful human brain-pan. Yes, hot foods trigger dopamine neurons; pleasure and pain reactions are surprisingly intertwined. I’m sure this fact will eventually find expression in a very long grad school thinkpiece which will quote Kurt Vonnegut.

Back to our friend and autocrat, the brain. Regarding pain and pleasure transmissions: these “wires”—to use highly-accurate electronics metaphors for a monstrous biochemical enigma that is still basically a black box full of surprises to us—cross over and so pain signals can sometimes create endorphin rushes, which manifest as a pain-pleasure combination which is emotionally similar to the thought of punching a clown: yes, I will laugh, and yes, I will cry, but who’s to say the end result won’t be wonderful for everyone, specifically me? Plus, after eating salsa, we feel relief after the pain, which means more pleasure. To quote literally every band in the Nineties, it’s a bittersweet symphony.

Eating salsa creates fun which makes us come back to the agony well for another kiss of pepper, because let’s face it, we don’t have better things to do. There’s only so much sleeping and consuming free air one can spend the afternoon doing, so why not keep it realer than real and try to go higher up the self-injury ladder for more raw kicks? Your tongue hates you, but your tongue hates a lot of good things, like teeth and speaking Russian. Why listen to it now?

Only humans like spicy foods. Did you know that? Paul Rozin, a prof at University of Pennsylvania, watched pigs ‘n’ dogs ‘n’ rats in Oaxaca. Do you know what kind of grub they fancy? That’s right. Bland. Non-spicy. Suppose we could combine them into crazier animals still: suppose we break through the barrier which has kept us from inventing the promised pigdog. Evidence suggests the animal desire for boring-ass grub would be the same, no matter what crossovers we try. In other words, it’s just us. The rest of our relations in the animal world want nothing to do with our weird habit. Rozin tried to raise baby rats on spicy foods. Tried to nurse sick rats back to health on spicy foods. Nothing worked. Too sane. Humans have no such hang-ups. Need no restraint. All-Star. Never stop.

Rozin figured it was our extremely sensible psychology which led us to rewrite our cookbooks into pure pain-operas. Some of you out there are doubters and haters of humanity, but consider: would a lesser, lamer, sadder species have designed jagged corn fragments with painful sauce to jab into your mouth?

No? Well, then: maybe you should give your fellow bros and ladybros a break, because CS is what we do for fun. We took a thing we have to do—eating—and made it harder. Deliberately. Look, this is a crazy planet, if you haven’t been paying attention. We strap into vehicles powered by internal explosions and many of us smoke pure, raw cancer. Most of us drink mind-numbing neurotoxin poison for fun. We used war-rockets to heave an airtight metal bucket at the nearest space-rock so a man in a white fat-suit could put our tribal cloth on it. Not for any gain, just to get one over our equally mad neighbor, who had killed the Tsar fifty years previous. We live with domesticated wolves and we keep them near our children. We invented a global communications network and use it mostly to film cats. As a species, we will, quite literally, fall in love with anything: fictional characters, houses, cars, Mr. Darcy. There are people in Japan who have spurned relationships with real, functioning members of their species to adore anime “waifus.” Soon, the robots will come, and the result will not be Westworld—bigly tragic and alienating—but awkward and embarrassing for everyone. That is the species which invented CS, and it is glorious.

I confess, I feel bashful even describing this supper of sages, as if this spicy bullet to the tongue and heart could be quantified by mere calculation or explanation. Who are we to fathom CS? What genius of memes and potions could riddle it out? True, we have measured the orbit of the planets and figured out, in my lifetime, how to cram an ungodly amount of graham in one cracker: no more do the empty lifeless canyons of our wastelands echo with the plaintive cry of “How do they cram all that graham?” In the last century, we have seen the wonder of Bono and all that ski lifts may do for us. But this era contains the oddest turnaround of all: previous generations were told that if they couldn’t stand the heat, to get out of the kitchen; but in the modern era, we have the kitchen bring the heat to us.

Photo by amanda kelso/Flickr

Jason Rhode is on Twitter.