Here's an idea.
Some American attitudes about food
are clearly communicated by our hot sauce labels.
So since we are talking about hot sauce today,
instead of the record corner, we thought
it might be more appropriate to shoot
this episode in my kitchen where I keep
my collection of hot sauces.
And speaking of, which welcome to my actual apartment.
I feel like I'm contractually obligated to ask,
won't you be my neighbor?
Full disclosure, I really like hot sauce.
Me and my girlfriend, we have a lot of hot sauce.
And there's even one that we love
so much, it's called Secret Aardvark,
that we buy it in bulk.
No, really.
We buy it in bulk.
I actually own this much Secret Aardvark.
They're not even paying me to say this.
I've seen and tried all different kinds of hot sauces
from all around the world.
And I've noticed some motifs.
We could talk forever about the different flavors,
smoky, sweet, vinegary, tomato-y.
But actually, I don't want to talk about what's
inside the bottles.
I want to talk about what's on them, their labels.
I've picked up on a couple patterns.
Jamaican and other island style hot sauce labels tend
to have animals on them, like the parrot on Pickapeppa
or the leopard that's on the Queen Majesty label, which
is-- it is bottled in Brooklyn.
But it is a Jamaican style hot sauce.
I told you I was a hot sauce weirdo.
Mexican and South American hot sauce labels
tend to show maybe a pretty lady or their country of origin.
And Asian hot sauce labels, well, actually, we're
going to talk about the crown jewel of sriracha
in a little bit after we've spoken
for a second about American hot sauce labels, which are always
the most interesting.
So by my totally not scientific but definitely
being a little bit of a hot sauce aficionado count,
American hot sauce labels seem to come in four varieties.
The first is purely sauce business.
It just talks about what's in the bottle.
No claims are made.
No jokes are told.
It's purely descriptive and actually pretty rare.
Hot sauce labels are rarely this unadorned because I mean,
come on.
(SINGING) America!
The second label type is found on arguably the most
well-known American hot sauce Tabasco, whose label has always
looked to me like it belongs on a barrel of whiskey.
The design has a tippletastic twinge
that looks like it's been burned into the side of an oak
barrel, which makes sense given that Tabasco
comes from Louisiana, a state known for its hot nightlife.
Label type three shows some dramatis pepper sonae, usually
a rugged looking customer, as is the case with Mountain Man,
or a cartoon version of some animal.
The dudes are tough and grizzled, like this hot sauce
I have that's in the shape of a cowboy,
while the animals are usually either consuming the hot sauce,
holding its ingredients, or experiencing its side effects,
as is the case with the alligator on the label
for Bayou Butt Burner.
And finally, there's the label type
that acts as a warning for the pain you are about to endure,
a skull and crossbones, a triple x, maybe a spiceometer.
This one has a Fallout symbol drawn on it.
And this one just cuts right to the chase and says,
pain is good.
Some go to really bizarre extremes
and are labeled as though they are actual weaponry
or as if they will literally kill you.
This hot sauce came with a skull on a key ring attached to it.
Now why do I find these labels so interesting?
It's because with very few exceptions,
they suggest that the hot sauce ingester must
possess a certain constitution.
This is American exceptionalism in a bottle.
These labels indicate that one must be this tough to sauce.
These cowboy looking gentlemen imply
that hot sauce, like whiskey and a tough life on the range,
ain't for everybody, just the rugged.
Spittoon noise.
Some labels, like my favorite, Secret Aardvark,
even insinuate that the hot sauce is not
intended for human consumption, that one
must be a literal animal to consume hot sauce.
And true hot sauce fact, in order
to buy some of these for episode research,
I had to sign a waiver indicating
that I understood some of them are not intended
for direct human consumption.
You're supposed to dissolve a knife tip amount in, I don't
know, 10 gallons of gumbo.
There are some of these I'm never going to open.
They are just too scary.
It's called Drink This and You'll Die.
Basically, what I'm saying is that in order
to enjoy Da Bomb Beyond Insanity,
you can't just be awesome.
You have to be awesome and tough.
You have to be, I'm very sorry for this, hot sauwesome.
Heck, you might not even enjoy whatever supremely spicy hot
sauce you're eating.
But you will have successfully consumed it.
You will have won.
You will have been victorious over your meal of breakfast
potatoes.
Hot sauces make food exciting by turning it into a challenge.
They turn meal time into a competition, two things
that Americans love.
We've built a country whose theme is basically
turning every possible thing into a competition.
So why not also taste bud fortitude?
I definitely have a weird pride in being
able to eat spicier things than most people,
though I will say hot pepper gaming looks
a little unpleasant.
And Chuck from the Bronx, holy hot sauce, that guy
is just on another level.
Chuck, if you happen to be watching this,
I don't know how you do it, man.
It's getting worse too.
None of this is to say, though, that other cultures don't have
spicy dishes, that America somehow has
the corner on fiery mouth pain.
Indian, Thai, Korean, Jamaican, they all
have some supremely spicy dishes.
Oh my god!
That ain't nice.
But the spice tends to be less of a game.
In other cultures, spiciness complements companion flavors
as opposed to overpowering them or as a friend from India said,
a lot of everything is kind of the theme for American food.
Our cuisine isn't exactly known for its variety or subtlety
of flavor.
And case in point, on the Frank's RedHot label,
is the slogan I put that splat on everything.
Sometimes food is just a capsaicin delivery mechanism,
which brings us finally and in conclusion
to sriracha, which Molly and I love so much that we actually
have a framed watercolor of it in our stairwell.
And for anybody who's writing a lol hipster comment,
let me stop you so that I can point out
my steer horns, fixed gear bicycle, and collection
of hot sauces.
The degree of my hipstertude was not in question.
So sriracha refers to a variety of hot sauces in Thailand.
But in the United States, it almost always
refers to sriracha rooster sauce, made by Huy Fong
Foods in California.
True to its Thai roots, its label is simple, artful.
It has a rooster on it.
It makes no claims about pain, insanity, or butts,
though by many accounts, it has complete license to.
Like Mr Matthew The Oatmeal Inman
wrote a comic love letter to the tasty fire
storm that is sriracha.
And I think that might be why it is so popular.
I mean, yes, it does taste good.
And it did become a little bit of a cult thing
that maybe got a little overblown, perhaps
because of Mr The Oatmeal.
But I do think its spiciness, the fact that it's
in the spiciest neighborhood a widely available hot sauce dare
venture, more so than Tabasco and Frank's, at least,
is what made it such a phenomenon.
Whatever you put sriracha on is going
to end up tasting like sriracha, garlic, chiles, vinegar, yeah,
but also maybe a little bit of excitement or a challenge,
and depending upon your taste bud
toughness, a dash of danger.
[HOMER SCREAMS]
Though you would never know it from the label.
What do you guys think?
Do hot sauce labels indicate something
about American attitudes towards food?
Or are there labels that indicate things
about your culture's attitude towards food?
Let us know in the comments.
And I'll meet you for the next part of the episode
over in the record corner.
It's been a while.
Let's see what you guys had to say about popularity.
Remember that episode that we did a while ago, popularity?
So first things first, a couple items of business.
You guys want to hang out with me, which
is very flattering and cool.
So we hinted that we might be doing a, like,
office hours kind of thing.
And I think that's a thing we're gonna do.
I still got to figure out when, probably
sometime in the next couple months.
So keep an eye out here, probably on Twitter and also
Facebook.
And yeah, let's-- we'll go to a place together and talk about
fun things.
Also, hey, I started a podcast.
It's called Reasonably Sound.
And you can find it on iTunes and at infiniteguest.org.
It's about sound stuff and theory and science
just all related to audio.
So, ah, yeah, if you need more podcasts to listen to,
which who doesn't, I have one of those.
So from the subreddit, StringEpsilon seizes on one
of the problems with the popularity episode,
which is that, you know, depending
upon how you view things, everything
has the potential of being popular culture.
And so then what is popular culture?
And ManicsProlix kind of does this really great summary
of kind of what I think the point I was trying to get at
was, which is that it's not the what, it's the how.
And so when popular culture becomes,
right, an activity and not a thing,
then everything has the potential
of being interacted with in a popular culture way, which
I think, the more I think about it, just sounds right to me.
I don't know.
But these were great comments.
You should check them out.
Heather Feather, thank you so much for writing a comment
and for making awesome videos.
If anybody likes ASMR stuffs, Heather makes awesome videos.
We'll put a link to her channel in the doobly doo.
CatOwlFilms brings up the really good point
of the importance of time when talking about popularity.
And this is actually related to a point
that me and Idea Channel's producer Andrew
talk about all the time, which is
that time is kind of the best filter for popularity
and that this-- it kind of can sometimes make things
seem more popular than they were in their time.
You know, like, we-- like, the one that I always go to
is Led Zeppelin, right, they never had a number one hit.
But we think of them as this massively important band.
And they are.
But their popularity has so much to do
with the time that has passed between when they
were, you know, active and now.
So yeah.
Good point.
Missvbbeast wites a self-described mini Idea
Channel episode and asks whether or not
something can be so popular that it is not popular culture
and makes the case that Disney, in fact, is not
so much popular culture as it is just part of who we are,
that it has become so popular it has kind of transcended
this designation.
This is a really interesting, and I
think, great question to ask.
A link to this comment and all the others in the doobly doo.
Frank Cortese makes a really salient point
that comparing viewership numbers across platforms
can be a maybe irresponsible thing to do,
because that viewership is measured
in totally different ways.
And so comparing them, right, it's
not-- it's like apples and oranges
even though it's viewership numbers.
And yeah, I mean, I think this is maybe
even one of the biggest features of the changing face
of popularity that we can always kind of find a metric
to make something look popular.
But then we want to compare the two and say,
this thing is more pop-- more or less
popular than this other thing.
[SIGHS] It gets very complicated very quickly.
To my advice, you know, this might just
be me being very cynical.
But the older I get, the less I feel
like it's possible for a true counter or subculture to exist.
It seems to me that every counter or subculture that I've
seen or been involved in has eventually
become a feature of popular culture,
like, just through and through.
I mean, I did just turn 30.
Maybe that has something to do with it.
And also, I mean, now that I'm saying it,
maybe it's-- maybe they're not meant to last.
Maybe that's the point.
But God that's depressing.
Right?
I don't know.
I got to think about this more.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these saucy individuals.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
Links in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from Nina Casey,
who points us towards a hyperallergic post, man
I love hyperallergic, about turning the warriors depicted
on ancient Greek pottery into animated GIFs.
It is delightful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]