Trendlines don’t lie. As this chart shows, in warmer countries, people eat spicier food. Conversely, the colder the climate, the fewer spicy ingredients in your cuisine. There are of course outliers and other exceptions (and we’ll get to those). But the three-pepper question is: Why do dishes in hotter climates use more spices? That’s the topic of an article published in Nature in February 2021. By examining 33,750 recipes from 70 national and regional cuisines containing a total of 93 different spices, researchers wanted to test the oft-posited hypothesis that…
