Man On A Mission: Grow The World’s Hottest Chili Pepper

Eliza Barclay at NPR:

Look out, heat fiends. A chili pepper so outrageously hot that it makes 2 in 3 people who eat it throw up is about to hit online stores.

“Your heart will race, you'll sweat. You might shake, you might throw up. But once it gets into your blood stream and gets into your brain the capsaicin releases the same endorphins that narcotics do. So you get a euphoric feeling.”

That's how Ed Currie of Rock Hill, S.C., described the effects of the chili he grew to reporter Marshall Terry of NPR member station WFAE. Currie, an amateur chili expert who works at a bank by day, aspires to break the Guinness World Record for the world's hottest chili.

Currie's prized HP22B pepper is just the latest achievement in the increasingly competitive world of fire and spice — from hot sauces to raw chilis.

Demonstrating his fearlessness as a reporter, Terry not only visited Currie's home to check out his 1,400 chile plants, he also tried the HP22B himself. The results are not so pretty, but you can see them in a video they made…

More here. [Thanks to Samina Raza. Robin, get a hold of some of these.]