Spice tolerance isn’t about taste—it’s a hidden language of identity, authenticity, and privilege. Who decides what’s hot, who gets burned?
The third episode of Ted Lasso has the titular character being shadowed by Trent Crimm, the sceptical reporter from The Independent. That night Ted was invited to a family owned Indian restaurant by his former taxi driver. Ted Lasso is out of place not only as a white man in an Indian restaurant but also an American, from Kansas no less, who is wholly unfamiliar with the cuisine. He makes the unwise decision of asking the food to be prepared like “they are a couple members of the family.” The food arrives and neither can handle the spice. Ted soldiers on, not wanting to upset those who invited him.
It is this interaction that finally melts Crimm’s otherwise icy attitude towards Ted.
An AppleTV+ original, the show Ted Lasso is engineered to showcase men being soft, supportive, and most of all safe. What can be safer than a white man willing to ‘torture’ himself with spice? The episode ends with Ted getting the shits and rushing home. How, and why, does this signal safety? What inferences are we drawing from spice tolerance? Where does spice sit at the intersection of gender, race and online culture wars?
Your spice tolerance is a significant social signifier; through understanding perceptions of spice tolerance, we gain insight into shifting webs of relationships between identities, like race, gender, and politics1.
We look at how spice has come to represent the Indian community globally, how spice is treated within the Indian community, how expectations of spice tolerance falls along gendered notions of strength, and discuss the transcultural implications of observing historic injustice and how trends skewer truth.
Spice as Signifier
Cultures in the global North with significant Indian communities have synonymized spice and “Indianness”.
Stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj’s appearance on the YouTube talkshow Hot Ones begins with the question, “How are you with hot food?” Minhaj responds, “As an Indian, I’m pretty good.”
“Do you feel the pressure of your people on your shoulders? And you really need to come correct?”, the host adds.
Proliferation of identity-based language has created a slew of terms to describe every intersection between “white” and “Indian” culture: American born confused desi (ABCD), fresh off the boats (FOB), coconut, firangi. An ABCD must outdo a white American in spice tolerance, but they, in turn, should be outdone by a FOB, who should then be trumped by any “real” middle-class Indian2.
On the show, failure to complete the wings results in induction into the Wall of Shame. For Minhaj it would imply he was less of a man and less of an Indian.
It would surprise very few that this perception is no accident. Spice tolerance has evolved into a complex signifier of cultural authenticity, identity, and social dynamics, reflecting deeper issues of identity and belonging in a world increasingly obsessed with authenticity.
Spice as a signifier brings with it deeply embedded structures of caste. Ragini Kashyap notes, in the paper “Caste: The Main Character of Indian Food,” “Today, the perception of Indian cuisine is primarily that of an upper-caste cuisine. It is ironic that approximately a quarter of all Indians are unlikely to ever have access to this food which restaurants around the world serve in abundance.” Going on to highlight, “[d]espite boasting a staggering diversity of highly developed cuisines, this division is, incredibly, one of the few constant features of Indian food along the length and breadth of the country. The ghee-laden curries enhanced with elaborate spice mixtures are primarily the prerogative of the upper-castes, while the curries of the lower castes are often simpler counterparts that maximise available ingredients.”
Failure to eat rakti3, dish more common among the Dalit population of India, or axone4, popular among North-East Indians, would make no one feel less Indian. Yet, spice remains the foremost mark of Indian cuisine— a dynamic created by a hierarchy in which historically privileged Indians alone imagine what constitutes Indian.
Having your Curry and eating it too
Under the guise of combating colonial structures, the Indian diaspora continues to spread ideas about food that draw directly from Manusmriti5. Often, it is the same people pushing for more inclusive language and conversations in Europe and America who are complicit in India’s backslide on social issues.
In a 2020 survey, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, found that “Indian Americans’ policy views are more liberal on issues affecting the United States and more conservative on issues affecting India. Regarding contentious issues such as the equal protection of religious minorities, immigration, and affirmative action, Indian Americans hold relatively more conservative views of Indian policies than of U.S. policies.”
Narratives of food shape imaginations of India abroad and at home. The most prominent dishes—biryani, tikka, gravies rich in whole spices and expensive oils—allude to India’s monarchical history, where these dishes were prepared through significant labour by marginalised castes and women.
Proponents attempt to claim Indian cuisine as an exemplary model of communal sharing and strong communities, unlike the isolated communities in ‘Western’ countries. They neglect to mention the underlying caste dynamics and the prevalence of the two-tumbler system, both within and beyond India.
This foray into food implies a greater tension within a global Indian identity: keen to partake in the economic spoils of liberal democracy, granted by cultures tentatively re-evaluating their colonial histories, while continuing to stifle similar introspection within India.
Conclusion
It is hard to avoid patriarchy. Even in efforts to reimagine masculinity, its ideals often persist. Ted Lasso is, of course, a fantastic and aspirational model of masculinity—encouraging, empathetic, and kind. Yet, he must be hyper-competent. Something which extends to most characters on the show. They must be able to effortlessly score a free kick if they set their minds to it, create secret, successful, football tactics, and defy age for a final hurrah. If they were unable to—if Ted couldn’t handle the spice, unable to come correct—we might feel shame on their behalf.
This is okay. Apple TV+ should keep attempting to reimagine masculinity, we must keep attempting to avoid patriarchy. The show’s use of spice served for us only to be a jumping off point for a rabbit hole into the transculturality of spice.
This rabbit hole, unfortunately, ends where most do; at the bottom is historic marginalisation, enduring oppression, and capitalism. A reading of the text so far may leave you with a simple narrative. Upper caste, privileged, men perpetuate within Indian communities, at home and abroad, patriarchal notions of spice tolerance and gate-keep away women and minorities through subtle but persuasive ridicule. We should and must resist the urge to perpetuate this paradigm. Good praxis is to accept people for the spice tolerance they have, not pressure or push people and to live and let live.
But there exists some dissonance here. I love spice. I was made to love spice. By friends who pushed me to eat spicier and spicier food, at times directly playing on masculine insecurity. It worked – I loved it. I cherish a biriyani that can clear my sinuses and numb me. When living outside India I freely used my spice tolerance as cultural cachet to bond and talk to those from other cultures. I am perhaps just as tacitly guilty as the Indian diaspora I bemoan.
It has been easy to be cripplied by the sense that all explorations of culture and its origins must result in some newfound disapproval. This is a failing and is avoided by simply being encouraging, empathetic to oneself. We can, and should, continue to think about the transformative, challenging and mundane effect of cultures, and their histories, on our lives without turning to despair. Understanding histories should not lead to guilt that creates shame, shame which creates secrecy. We shouldn’t be afraid to make things spicy.
- In “The spicy spectacular: food, gender, and celebrity on Hot Ones,” Emily J.H. Contois of University of Tulsa looks at how the show “creates, maintains, and manipulates inequitable gender hierarchies through the interrelated performances of gender, food consumption, and celebrity.” It specifically looks at the “cool girl” trope as it emerges in the show. Citing the example of Padma Lakshmi, a woman of Indian origin, whose episode is titled, “Padma Lakshmi Gracefully Destroys Spicy Wings.”
https://emilycontois.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/contois_spicyspectacular.pdf ↩︎ - Middle-class as commonly used, not statistically. ↩︎
- Meat cooked with pig or goat blood. Recipe link. ↩︎
- Fermented soybean dish with a strong smell. ↩︎
- Ancient Hindu “legal” text which codified caste and gender hierarchies, further reading: How to Look at Manusmriti and the Caste System, Devdutt Pattanaik ↩︎
