 Chili is flavor, chili is fun, chili is exciting, chili is versatile, chili is an aphrodisiac. This is second nature, as soon as you're born, I mean in your baby, you're eating hot sauce. Chili is better than that. It could be better than sex. It was so incredibly hot. I mean, I would have drank ditch water if I could have found it. It felt like I didn't have any teeth. You really want to taste hot chili, because it's like jumping out of an airplane. The excitement you get from doing that, that's the excitement you'll get from tasting a good hot chili. And you become addicted to it, and you start getting into it, and you start really liking it. So once you become a chili head, you really become a chili head. Yeah, I'm a chili headed. There are times that I go through withdrawal, if I go through more than a week without chilies, I'm very sad, I'm very depressed, I'm very boring. With chili, it gives drama to my life, it gives effervescence and excitement, good stuff. What's with these people? It sounds like they're part of some drug cult, but actually they're just enthusiastic about their favorite food, chili peppers. Hi, I'm Dave Dewitt, here in historic Santa Fe, New Mexico, and your host for Heat Up Your Life, the definitive documentary that explores the weird, wonderful relationship between human beings and the hot and wild. You see, people have been infatuated with chili peppers for thousands of years, and this strange but powerful entanglement has changed the course of human history. And as you'll see, this madness still continues today. So prepare your palate and get ready to heat up your life. In the interest of people, peppers and passion, we dedicate this next hour to heat up your life. And now, episode one, Peppers and People, how hot and spicy has changed our world. Every year since 1988, the National Fiery Food Show is held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's a show that proves beyond any doubt that people all over the world have gone berserk over chili peppers and hot and spicy foods. About 12,000 chili heads, those avid fanatics of hot and spicy, visit more than 260 booths at the Albuquerque Convention Center. But what exactly are these bizarre connoisseurs looking for? This is a convocation of pepper heads like happens nowhere else on the planet that I know, and it's free samples. Need some pickled chilies? How about some habanero pecan brittle? Y'all like to try some? It's really good. Or green chili pistachios? Like to try some raw garlic cloves with red chili? Or the crazy insanity sauce? With me is a gentleman named Dave Hershkoff, and he's in a straight jacket, and why on earth would you wear a straight jacket to the Fiery Food Show? Well, because we make insanity sauce. Oh, what is insanity sauce exactly? Well, it's what we claim to be the hottest sauce in the universe, and is the only sauce ever banned from this show. I know, because I banned the sauce from this show, at least a tasting of it. So you were the pioneer in developing the super hot sauce category in Fiery Foods. Tell us how you came up with the idea, and then tell us why. Well, I used to own a restaurant in Maryland, and we got a lot of drunks in the restaurant. So I used hot sauces to just get the drunks out. Why would people consume these super hot sauces? You know, after all these years, I'm still not sure, you know, there's the macho appeal, how hot can you eat it? There's the drug appeal of it, sort of an endorphin and kavelin sort of rush. And there's just sort of, some people like to just do something strange. And one of the stranger things that chili heads do is collect as many bottles of hot sauce as they can. Behind my friend Chip Hearn here is about 50 different hot sauces, which represents about one-one-hundredth of his entire hot sauce collection. Tell us, Chip, about your sauce collection. We try to have as many different sauces as we can at any time to taste, end the sale, end the collect, but I have 5500 different sauces in the collection. How did you collect these sauces? Started out just by our travels. We travel a lot, not as much as you, but we travel a lot and bring back hot sauces to the collection. We still do a lot of traveling through South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. But now it's become a concept where people are sending us sauces. And where is this collection housed? Dewey Beach, Delaware. We have a restaurant called the Starboard Restaurant in Dewey Beach, and we have all the sauces lined up behind plexiglass in the restaurant itself, in the dining rooms. That's to prevent people from walking off with the sauces, right? Yes. The obsession with hot and spicy products is not just limited to the United States. At the Fiery Foods show, manufacturers show up from all over the world, including Panama, where abonero sauces such as Congo sauce are very popular. Interestingly, an identically named sauce showed up from Trinidad and Tobago. Indian products such as curry sauces are represented by the colorful chef's shake. Taste it and enjoy it. Asia was well represented at the show, with exhibitors coming all the way from China. Back home in China, the mass of the people believed that this kind of pepper sauce really, really increased your appetite, you know? And also, they believed that this can help you to reduce body fat, because it increases the blood circulation, and that gives you more energy. And the other things I don't know whether I should say it or not, they even claim and they believe that they somehow increased the sexual activity. Even the region of Tibet is represented at the show. Your sauces are infused with Tibetan herbal wisdom, and what we say is our trademark slogan is, liberate your senses, and that's what it does. Our latest sauce is called the Tibetan Dead Hot Sauce, and it comes with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it retails for about $10. One thing you'll learn from the Fiery Foods show is that everyone has very strong opinions about their products. We won first place last year at Best Pepper Sauce at the show, and we were going to win again, and we were going to be another Tabasco sauce. This is going to be all over the world. It's in Saudi Arabia right now. It's going to England. It's going to Japan. It's going everywhere, and we one day are going to be very, very wealthy with this product, because it is the finest pepper sauce in the world, made with the albinero pepper, and that's what makes it so unique. Besides the thyme, the basil, ginger, garlic, sweet pepper, onion, celery, and the albinero pepper again. And what conclusions are reached at the Fiery Foods show? You get the opportunity to be part of a cult. I mean, you're just like a following. You know, there's people that like all sorts of things, but this is a safe cult. You don't kill anybody. You don't accept yourself. Eating chili is better than eating nearly anything else there is to eat. It almost makes you want to sin. What, or perhaps a better question, is who's responsible for all this chili madness? To answer that question, we're going to have to take a journey far back in time. It was here, on this tiny Caribbean island of San Salvador, where most historians agree things really started moving. But that was even earlier than when this island drummer's slave ancestors first came to the Bahamas. For tens of thousands of years, chili peppers were exclusively a new world crop, separated from the people of Europe and Asia by the vast uncharted expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. But shortly after the year 1492, events began to heat up all over the globe. After landing in the new world, Christopher Columbus encountered two of the most important foods the world has ever known, corn and, of course, chili, which he promptly misnamed as pepper. Columbus took the offering back to his ship, and within a century, the major cuisines of the world would be changed forever. Records do not show whether Columbus and crew sampled the pungent peppers on their long voyage back to Spain. But chilies were one of many new world plants laid at the feet of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella upon the explorer's return. After 1493, West Indies chili seeds were made available to the Spanish, where they were carefully grown in monastery gardens. Monks and amateur gardeners cultivated the plants and later provided seed to other collectors in Europe. It was soon apparent how this hot, culinary upstart would be accepted by the rest of the continent. Peter Martyr, a cleric in the Spanish court at Barcelona, wrote, It is called caribe, meaning sharp and strong, and when it is used, there is no need of black pepper. Chili peppers quickly spread throughout Europe as the seeds made their way across the Mediterranean Sea and moved eastward from Spain. Portuguese explorers carried chili peppers and their seeds from the Iberian Peninsula to ports in North Africa and West Africa. Additionally, Portuguese trade from their colonization of Brazil introduced South American varieties directly into Africa. Carried by trading ships, the Portuguese introduced chilies into their colony of Mozambique. The chilies were spread into the interior of Africa by farmers and by birds. From Africa, the Portuguese carried the chilies to their colony in Goa, India, and curries would never be the same. The Portuguese also were involved in the spice trade, so their ships added a new spice to the spice islands as chilies were spread to what is now Malaysia and Indonesia. Once in Asia, chilies quickly spread to Southeast Asia, China, and the Philippines. Once in the Philippines, Spanish traders carried the seeds across the Pacific on their way to their colony of Mexico. And in this manner, chilies were established on Pacific islands such as Hawaii. Within 100 years of their discovery by Columbus, chilies had circumnavigated the globe. And what was the legacy of Columbus? Chili botanist Dr. Hardy Eshba. If we take a look at chili peppers or capsicum on a global basis, what we find is this now has become the primary hot spice everywhere in the world, although all peppers originally came from the New World. Everything we see in the old world has occurred since 1492. It is a dominant crop in many parts of the world, Thailand, India, Tanzania, and Africa, and some of the Pacific islands. And it has shaped and changed dietary approaches of these people. Although we don't think of the food of the Middle East as being particularly fiery, chilies abound in the markets, like this one in Assalt, Jordan. Chile has become the world's largest producer of chili peppers, and the demand for chilies to feed its huge population has created gigantic markets devoted solely to chilies, like this one in Guntur, the chili capital of India. And we cannot imagine the cuisines of Southeast Asia without the pungency of chili peppers, which are grown in every country and are commonly available, like in this floating market outside of Bangkok, Thailand. Meanwhile, in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, chilies were often more than just a food. We spoke with chili expert Dr. Janet Long Solis in Mexico City. Another use of chili peppers was as a defensive weapon, and a burning fire of dried chili peppers is really a very accurate smell, and they would use it in small villages to prevent attacks from enemies. Peppers also had medicinal uses, mostly to treat infections, throat infections, teeth infections, cough, and pain. It was also just a pain reliever. To understand the early medicinal uses of chilies, we consulted a curandera, or healer. In the chili fields of Limitar, New Mexico, Maclovia Zamora picks the fresh green chilies for use in traditional herbal medicine. Zamora sells the chili and other medicinal herbs in the historic Bee Rupi Drug Store in downtown Albuquerque. We're in the back room of the Rupi Drug Store. Look at all these old drugs and chemicals and everything. Maclovia, how long has this been here? The turn of the century. We started with herbs, and then we went to medicines that are bottled and encapsulated, and now we're reverting back to the herbs. A natural progression, I'd say, and look at the chilies. My heavens, you've got New Mexico. Yes, New Mexico red chilies and some abaneros and some chili pecans, so you use this room to dry the herbs and chilies out, so... Yes, we do, because it's cool and it's dark. You almost have a museum back here. Yes, we would like to do that. Turn it into a museum one of these days. But in the day-to-day operation of Bee Rupi Drug Store, the role of chilies is paramount in herbal medicine. They are used as a catalyst for everything. You can add chili to everything that you are taking. That would be food. It would be remedies of some kind, any remedy. You have your choked cherry cough medicines, and you can add chili to that. You can add chilies to eucalyptus. That's also cough medicine. Chilies can be used for potasus. It can be used for salves and liniments. This is why you get a burning sensation whenever you apply a liniment. How would you mix something up to use chilies to relieve, say, arthritis pain? For arthritis pain, okay. Now, long ago, they used to use lard a lot from your chicharrones. They'd make chicharrones. They would save the lard. That lard was used for salves with chili. In order to make it a little firm, they would use the beeswax. That's called campiche. They use cayennes for colds, and they use it like maybe in a chili sauce, maybe in a form of cough syrup. They can use it in a cough drop form. They can make cough drops out of those like you would make hard candy, but you would add the chili to it. You can use it for headaches. It opens up your sinuses and it drains off all that mucus that drains into your lungs and into your chest area and causes inflammation. So it is a very, very good source for controlling colds. The Rupi drugstore also sells all the modern remedies containing chili peppers, but the corandettas will tell you that the herbal concoctions work just as well and are much less expensive. And some people believe that chilies also have supernatural powers. There was a case that came in here one time, and it happened to be a man that owned a business, a filling station, and he was feeling the presence of very negative things happening and he wanted to bring in some very positive things. So then we were telling him that he should take maybe a container made out of Micaceous clay or something like that and build a fire with a cross similar to this that has been blessed. And to take chilies or chili powder and set that on there and then burn these items until they're absolutely turned into ashes and to go around the place with this and just cleanse the whole area around the filling station or his business that he had and to do it at midnight, always at midnight full moon if possible. When all the items in the container finish burning and turn into ash, then you must take these items and throw them in the river so that they can flow away with the current and all the negativity flows away with it. My ears are tingling. But sometimes the extreme heat of some chili peppers has a negative aspect as this college student is learning the hard way. Takes a lot to make me sweat but this is making me sweat. My hands are numb, everything. I feel like I'm gonna... At New Mexico Tech in the town of Socorro, Dr. Frank Etscor, the inventor of the nicotine patch, is cheerfully torturing his students to determine if chilies release natural narcotics in our bodies called endorphins. We'll have two groups of subjects. We'll put powdered habanero pepper about a fourth of a gram or a little bit less on each one of their tongues. And then we'll have them rate the pain as it increases, as it invariably will. And at that point, we're suspecting that the body is probably releasing endorphins to try to help attenuate that pain. Then when the subject maintains that the pain has diminished, we'll inject them with the narcotic antagonist, Narcan. And we will hope to see some of the pain return if we block the attenuating properties using the antagonist, the pain should return. And that's basically the study right there. It truly is a chilly high. I mean, you experience one every time you eat a really hot pepper or too hot for your tolerance. And I experienced it. It was like figures were more defined and my head was really light and I really didn't have too much pain after that. And I really needed to sit down because I was just relaxed. Not relaxed, but in this type of euphoria, I guess, euphoric state. And I think I hit the chilly high. Well, the pain involved with chilly is from more than likely capsaicin. It's a very potent drug. It's a neurotoxin, certainly not neurotoxic levels at what we consume in our food products. But capsaicin certainly produces pain. It works with a neurotransmitter called substance P. It works with a neurotransmitter called serotonin. And those two neurotransmitters are intimately related to another neurotransmitter called the endorphins. There are a wide variety of those things and we know that there are about a thousand times more potent than morphine itself. Dr. Etskorn proved that chilies release pain-killing drug-like endorphins. But scientists have also found that capsaicin interferes with the transmission of pain signals to the brain by depleting the neurotransmitter substance P. This has led to pain-killing topical creams for the treatment of arthritis and other pain. But in addition to medicine, modern science has other interests in chili peppers. This is Guatemala, a small Central American country. It has its share of environmental problems typical of other developing nations around the world. One of the more severe difficulties is the continuing loss of native habitat because of slash and burn agricultural practices that result in the loss of plant and animal species. After burning, the land is planted for crops, but the soil eventually wears out and can no longer support agriculture. What remains is a land devastated and virtually devoid of life. Certainly not a place where you would expect to find wild chili peppers. But try telling that to Dr. Paul Boslin, the intrepid professor of horticulture at New Mexico State University. The foremost chili pepper breeder in the world, Boslin traveled to the jungles of Guatemala in search of treasure, invaluable plant genetic material. About 55 years ago, Paul Stanley from the Field Museum of Chicago toured Guatemala looking for some of the wild species types, and he found two specific species in the localities, and he took very excellent records of where he found them, at what altitudes and the kinds of ecological zones he found them in. And so what we'd like to do is go back to those zones and see if they exist. And the reason is that they don't exist in anyone's germplasm collection or gene banks in the world. Are they still existing or have they gone extinct? They're excellent species in the sense that they're adapted to damp, wet forests is what his notes say. So when a pepper would have adapted to this damp, wet forest, it carries many genes that would be useful to pepper workers. One of the unfortunate aspects of these wild species is that they are weeds. They have no economic value, commercial value for local people to use in a sense they try to eradicate it. And that's what we come up against when we look for wild species is that they either have to be in areas where there's very little human activity or where there is some other use that we don't really know about. And maybe medicine is one of the things that we would hope with the wild species of capsicum. Maybe some of the people are saving it because of its medicinal purposes. And there are other reasons for wild capsicum preservation. Two species, lanciolatum and ciliatum, just may provide a cure for fungal diseases, such as phytophora root rot that plagues commercial growers back in the States. Baslin is eager to find moisture-tolerant species such as these as he presses on. Armed with Stanley's notes, good maps and local guides, he set out on an expedition to find them. His search takes him through virtually every type of habitat in Guatemala as he follows Stanley's trail. On a hunch, Baslin decides to search local village markets near Stanley's old trail. He's betting that someone may be harvesting wild chilies much like they do in Sonora, Mexico. He finds many different varieties of chilies, including semi-wild piquins, fresh cayennes, and even the fresh canario chilies, the pubescent species with their unique black seeds. But what was the result of his search for the wild species? Well, it's been a very disappointing trip, in a sense, for me, not being able to find these species. It appears that they are probably truly extinct in those regions since they grow in a very narrow belt or region only about from 1,000 meters to 2,000 meters in those localities. And in that area, it's intense farming now. So the likelihood of finding those species is slight or non-existent. What it means to us is that these species are extinct. They're used, they're valuable. Genetic resource has gone forever. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't bring the species back. And so it's a loss not only for us, but for future generations. But the Guatemala story doesn't end here. Baslin left the camera crew for one more attempt to find the wild species. A few years later, we spoke to him in his greenhouse at New Mexico State University. So, Paul, you took off from the tape crew and sort of went on your own to try to find Lancy Olatum, I guess, and apparently you did. Yeah, most of the places where it had been reported in the past were extinct, we couldn't find it. But there's a preserve in Guatemala set aside for the Quetzal bird. That's our national bird, isn't it? Yes, it is. And so in that preserve were a couple of populations of this wild plant that looked like Capsicum Lancy Olatum growing there. And, you know, bringing it home and looking at closer examination of it, it was. So were you able to get seed from this Lancy Olatum? Yes, we've been able to get a very nice seed increase and we'll be putting this into the USDA germplasm collection so other researchers can use this plant in their studies. You know, the wild plant here really has no use for a grower or a gardener at this point. But in the future, who knows what genes this thing may have for us. What about the outlook for the extinction of the species? It's very high, I guess you could say. It's extreme. Capsicum likes to grow where lots of people like to live and where other crops grow. And so it appears that it's becoming extinct. A lot of the species are the one on the Galapagos Islands can no longer be found. We have a difficult time finding this one. One of the species rare that nobody even has a living source of in Peru is not known anymore. So it's very dangerous. They like to grow in the rainforest and as we all know, the rainforest are being depleted quite rapidly. Well, if the birds eat the pods and pass through the seeds, how come this plant won't establish itself from the Ketzal preserve into the rest of Central America? Excellent question because it appears that the Ketzal is very, very sensitive to human encroachment. And so any time humans encroach into their territory, they leave, they move to a new area. They don't come back to the farming areas and so forth. Exactly. And so all wild chilies do have a bird association. We don't know if the Ketzal and the Elanso latum have that association, but there is some bird that is dispersed in the seed and it appears that it moves as the forest is being cut down and never comes back. But not all wild chilies have fared as badly as the ones in Guatemala. The role of preserving at least one wild chili species, the Arizona Chiltapeen, has been accomplished thanks to the efforts of Native Seeds Search, a Tucson organization devoted to conservation and seed saving. We spoke with chili expert Kevin Dahl at the Chiltapeen Reserve near Tumacocca. In every little canyon around here, different populations of these wild chilies have different genetic characteristics. Some of them may have developed characteristics that will be important as a tool to breed healthier, stronger, more resistant commercial chilies. They might be resistant to certain diseases, funguses, pests, and provide a palette of genetic material that plant breeders can work with. This is the wild chiltapeen plant here in the Wild Chili Reserve. We're preserving it in site. Of course, we've also collected seeds and have it in our seed bank in their frozen high-tech storage, but preserving the population intact where it's been growing for centuries gives us both a better protection that it will be preserved, but also a lot more information about how it interacts with the plants and animals around it. In the Sierra Madre Mountains of the Mexican state of Sonora, south of the reserve, wild chiltapeens are one of the few crops in the world that are harvested in the wild. After drying, they are imported into the United States and are packaged in one-quarter ounce bags selling for more than one dollar, making them the second most costly spice in the world after saffron. Sadly, because of economic pressures and cattle ranching, they are endangered in Mexico. This wild chili reserve is just one small step in what needs to be done to preserve genetic diversity. There are groups and organizations working to come up with an international strategy to preserve the most important areas right away. The wild chili peppers first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Americas. Dr. Janet Long Solis explains. Botanists tell us that the family of chilies had its origins in South America and more or less in the Andean area. And there are a wide variety of peppers, but there are only five domesticated species and between 20 and 30 wild or spontaneous species. There are many remains of chili peppers in archaeological sites in Mexico. One of the oldest is in southern Mexico, between 7,000 and 5,000 years before Christ. It's a very old plant. Some archaeologists believe it to be one of the first plants that was domesticated in Mesoamerica. But how were they domesticated? Botanists speculate that chilies were first treated as tolerated weeds that were harvested in the wild near villages. It was basic human nature to select the best and largest pods for eventual planting. Dr. Eshba theorizes about how this might have happened in the past and continuing even today. I've looked at the change in fruit size over the last 10 years, and there's a clear indication that selection is leading to an increase in fruit size. There's another one in Bolivia that the people have been using for years and years, and it's commercially harvested, put in bottles, sold that way. And if you do careful statistical analyses of fruit size change, which is a characteristic of domestication, you can see the fruit size where they're selecting this is increasing. So we're watching domestication before our eyes. Today there are five domesticated species of chili peppers with dozens of pod types and literally thousands of varieties. Obviously we can't cover every variety here, but we can give an overview of the peppers that people around the world love the most. The most common species grown around the world is capsicum annuum, which was domesticated in Mexico. It includes the familiar varieties like the non-pungent but colorful bell peppers like this quadrato bell. Jalapenos, famous for their use in salsas and nachos. Asian chilies used in stir-fry dishes, such as this, tie hot. The New Mexican chilies, including the enormous big gyms that are stuffed for chilies rianos. The ornamental chilies, such as the colorful New Mex riot, with its multicolored pods can be used in the yard as a border plant and then converted into a hot sauce. Capsicum frutescens, domesticated in Central America, includes a number of wild species and also the familiar Tabasco chili of hot sauce fame. One of the most common species in South America is capsicum bocatum, known in Spanish as ahi. This is probably the most familiar of the ahis called ahi amarillo. Other important bocatums include ahi limón, with its lemony flavor. And the ivory-colored ahi blanco, which can be used as an ornamental. The most unusual species is capsicum pubescens, another South American species. It was probably the earliest domesticated species since its wild ancestor has never been discovered. It occurs in South America as this red ricoto. And in Mexico and Central America as the yellow canario or canary pepper. The two distinguishing characteristics of the pubescent species are its beautiful purple flowers and its seeds. It is the only chili pepper in the world with black seeds. Last but certainly not least is capsicum chinense, the species that includes the world's hottest chili peppers that were domesticated in the Amazon basin of South America. Commonly they are known as abaneros, like these familiar orange abaneros from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. But actually, there are hundreds of varieties in South America and the Caribbean, like this ripening red congo pepper from Trinidad. And the internationally famous Scotch bonnet chili, which we filmed on location growing in a kitchen garden in Jamaica. The Scotch bonnets are used to make hot sauce like this one. How important are hot sauces around the world? To find out, we traveled to the hot sauce capital of the world, New Orleans, Arthur Humphries, owner of a hot sauce shop in the French Quarter. We ship all the way to Switzerland. To the Soviet Union, sometimes we ship some hot sauce to the Soviet Union. Some of the Indian that had moved to the Soviet Union, they don't have that over there and can't eat their food without it. They need a supply and they'll call up for a case of it. Keep our phones ringing off the hook for it. What would happen if people just couldn't get any hot sauce? You took our hot sauce away from us, yeah. Really getting in trouble. Really getting in trouble. You just thought something that was not good. Or you couldn't, but you got a lot of people that know how to fix their own that can really prepare their own hot sauce. If you're dead, they would, you'd have a lot of brewers in the backyard with people brewing hot sauce trying to make their own. And a lot of people out here are very qualified and they really know how to come from generation after generation from the ancestors knowing how to do hot sauce and they pass down recipes from different generations and a lot of these people know how to prepare their own hot sauce. Fortunately, with more than 10,000 different hot sauces manufactured in the globe, they aren't going to disappear anytime soon. Our planet is still safe. But with peppers and people, you need to understand that it's a world of extremes, like huge crowds of fanatic chili heads, the hottest sauce, the biggest collection of sauces and the world's largest enchilada. We took a journey to enchilada land, also known as Las Cruces, New Mexico, for the whole enchilada fiesta where the organizers construct the world's biggest stacked enchilada. We asked the enchilada maestro Robert Estrada just how big his enchilada is. Well, it was last year, it was 10 feet, 8 inches in diameter. How many people does that serve? We serve about 4,800. Making a tortilla that gigantic takes specialized equipment designed by Estrada, including a hydraulic tortilla press constructed out of a tow truck. Here the workers spray the press so the masa dough won't stick to its surface. Estrada explains the procedure. First thing we do, we press first tortilla, the masa weighs 250 pounds. Then we press first tortilla, we press it, we carry it into the frying pan and we fry it. We have 27 burners underneath, what we use. After we fry it, we pull it out, we take it on top of a serving plate and then I label the red chili sauce. We use 75 gallons of red chili sauce and then spread the cheese and onions and then we go back to the third one and we press the first tortilla and we do the same thing, we fry it and after it's fried, we pull it out and we come and we have to lay it on top of the first tortilla which is a lot of work and then I do the same thing I go again, I lay the red chili and then I spread the cheese and the onions and then we're done. After that, we cut it and then we serve it to the people and that's the way we make the ranchilada and then we put it on top of the second tortilla and then I label the red chili and then spread the cheese and the onions and then we're done. After that, we cut it and we make the ranchilada which is a lot of work. And how much does it cost to make an enchilada nearly 11 feet in diameter? About $10,000 a little over $10,000 I donated all of that to the community and what is the future of the world's largest enchilada? Well, I would like to make it bigger I would like to go 25 feet in diameter one of these days but I would like to do that before I am done making the enchilada. Pepper is fortifying and makes you sweat on a hot day so you can drink more. It's beautiful. Chili is exotic. So what you have here is an untapped resource of people who will go to any length to get hot products and as long as they keep wanting them, I'm going to try and come up with new ones. I'll have dattle pepper at least a couple of days if they want it. Chili will conquer the world, yes indeed. And from America it will cross the Atlantic instead of coming the other way around, yes. It's your number summer day when it's going to be really bright and you wake up just as the sun is rising and it comes up and suddenly the light bursts through and you hear the birds singing there's light everywhere and you see nature around you. That's a bite of a good pepper. Hot sauce is so important to the people of Louisiana it's like water and you just can't do without it. Chili is the essence of life as far as I'm concerned. Be it with con carne or be it with con queso or whatever it's just I don't know it's just kind of a spirit what makes people alive. And now you know why these people are called chili heads. I hope you've enjoyed Peppers and People the first episode of Heat Up Your Life. I'm Dave DeWitt saying adios from sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico and remember once you start eating chili peppers and hot and spicy foods your diet and your life forever.