Imagine you're at an amazing concert - the music is beautiful, the lyrics are deep, the artistry is incredible...except someone pointed a microphone at a speaker, causing loud high-pitched feedback.
The feedback is so loud and high-pitched that it causes you physical pain. It's louder than the music, it's hurting and hurting and getting worse the longer you hear it, and no one is doing anything to fix it for the duration of the entire concert.
That's what it's like to eat spicy food when you have a low tolerance for spiciness.
It hurts (the roof of your mouth, your tongue, your esophagus), and the pain gets worse the more you eat. On top of that, it completely overwhelms and buries the other flavours of the rest of the food, so you can't even perceive the interaction of the other flavours and textures. You may as well be eating spicy chalk.
People who enjoy spicy food seem to feel that the spiciness interacts interestingly with the other flavours.
But, for those of us with a low tolerance, that's like saying that the microphone feedback harmonizes delightfully with the rest of the music. We can't even tell, because it hurts and we can't even hear the delightful harmonies beneath.
Sometimes, people who enjoy spicy food point out that all spices are different, and, if you think a particular cuisine is too spicy for you, it's likely just one spice or style of preparation that's causing that effect, and you should try a variety of dishes and narrow down what exactly is bothering you.
That's like if you go to a concert at a particular venue and there's a lot of painful feedback. But when you say you don't want to go to that venue any more, people say "It's just that one set-up. You should go to more concerts there to see if they have other set-ups that don't cause the feedback." But why would you subject yourself to more pain to pinpoint the precise source of the pain when you could just go to one of the many other concert venues in the city, or listen to your own music at home?
2 comments:
Brilliant analogy. I completely concur.
Add that other people stand near the feedback, and express a kind of macho oneupmanship about the loud volumes they can tolerate.
Yes! And they act like you're dull and boring and Less Than for preferring concerts where you can hear the actual music, as though the actual music is incidental and the feedback is what everyone is here for.
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