Paqui, the maker of extremely spicy tortilla chips marketed as the “One Chip Challenge,” is voluntarily pulling the product from shelves after a woman said her teenage son died of complications from consuming a single chip.
The chips were sold individually, and their seasoning included two of the hottest peppers in the world: the Carolina Reaper and the Naga Viper.
Each chip was packaged in a coffin-shaped container with a skull on the front.
Lois Wolobah told NBC Boston that her 14-year-old son, Harris Wolobah, ate the chip Friday, then went to the school nurse with a stomachache. Wolobah said Harris — a sophomore at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts — passed out at home that afternoon. He was pronounced dead at the hospital later that day, she said.
Until sales of the product were suspended, Paqui’s marketing dared people to participate in the challenge by eating a chip, posting pictures of their tongues on social media after the chip turned it blue and then waiting as long as possible to relieve the burn with water or other food.
The challenge has existed in some form since 2016.
I think that tens of thousands of people have done it and this is the first fatality says that it was something unique about the victim, rather than the chip.
Please see @WHYAREWEALLCAPS’ repost of the NYT article below. This is the first fatality, but not the first hospitalization of a child.
Children have been hospitalized by peanuts as well.
Yeah lots of parents love to waste the ER’s time and staff with their kids petty complaints, doesn’t mean the product’s dangerous to any but a microscopic number of people.
In a 2020 study, researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center detailed the “serious complications” that can result from eating the Carolina Reaper pepper, noting that a 15-year-old boy had suffered an acute cerebellar stroke two days after eating one on a dare. The Carolina Reaper has been measured at more than two million Scoville heat units, the scale used to measure how hot peppers are. The Naga Viper has been measured at just under 1.4 million Scoville units. Jalapeño peppers are typically rated at between 2,000 and 8,000 units.
This is hotter than that. It’s not a safe product. I have no idea why you think it is.
It’s littered with warnings, at what point is it the consumers fault?
Just because it’s the consumer’s fault doesn’t mean a hot chip that can send you to the hospital should be on store shelves lol
I don’t think the mom has any right to sue, though
Why doesn’t the mom have any right to sue? That’s kind of how the American legal system works.
Because a parent can’t sue when their kid with peanut allergies eats a bag of candy that says WARNING: CONTAINS PEANUTS and dies. There’s lots of warning labels on the chip container
This is just my opinion, I’m not a lawyer
Should alcohol be illegal for everyone because it harms children? That’s the case you are basically making.
That’s the example you want to give in support of your argument that this chip should be within reach of kids? A highly-regulated product that can only be purchased by adults?
And where did I say it should be illegal? I said it doesn’t need to be on shelves and even implied they did nothing wrong legally (the mom shouldn’t be able to sue)
What exactly are you defending here?
Yes.
When you’re dealing with a child it’s never their fault. Kids do stupid shit.
Maybe an age limit should be put in place and a warning.
I think at the very least, yes.
This is hotter than that. It’s not a safe product. I have no idea why you think it is.
I’m not saying it is or isn’t safe, but this seems completely arbitrary. Why are you so sure that over 2 million scoville units is unsafe? There are some pepper spray brands that are in the 5 million+ range.
Did you read the pasted article? That’s why. And I wouldn’t suggest anyone ingest pepper spray, so that’s a weird comparison.
This is hotter than that. It’s not a safe product. I have no idea why you think it is.
How is it hotter than the peppers it is seasoned with?
Way more people have strokes after chiropractic neck adjustments and dental surgery. When are we banning those?
Are stores not allowed to decide what they want to sell?
How does that relate to my comment? We don’t have an official cause of death on this guy. We just have the mother claiming it was from the chip. The paper claiming the kid had a stroke 2 days after eating a hot chip seems very questionable.
We have lots of people who have gone to the ER after being in intense pain from eating something that causes intense pain. No evidence presented that they were actually in danger.
Chiropractors and dentists are well documented for causing strokes after neck adjustments and surgeries. There’s even a good explanation for why, in that they can both cause tears in the neck blood vessels and arteries resulting in blood clots that can very quickly get to the brain.
a 15-year-old boy had suffered an acute cerebellar stroke two days after eating one on a dare.
No actual danger?
woah be careful you’re about to dismantle the whole anti vax argument if you keep talking like that
Sorry I’ll wait for the final report. Something was almost certainly fucked up with that kid before hand.
They are hot, but no fuckin way do I believe for a second that chip killed that kid without subs freakish underlying condition.
This. There’s no known mechanism by which oral capsaicin can kill someone, and millions of these chips have been sold and eaten without incident. They’ve been on the market for 7 years. You’ll notice even the article is careful to say that the chip “was implicated in” his death, or that “his mother believes the chip caused his death”, but no one will actually say the chip killed him. This is because they don’t know what happened at all. It makes sense to pull it from the shelf and I’m glad they did that while they figure out what happened, but unbeknownst to me everyone on Lemmy is a post hoc pathologist because we’re all talking like we know for sure the chip killed the kid. Sometimes life is too complicated for common sense, you know?
My guess is allergy to one of the peppers in it, but I guess we have to wait for the autopsy to be sure.
Something was almost certainly fucked up with that kid before hand.
Well sure, but the chip still contributed to his death.Like, if someone has a skull as thin as an eggshell and you—unknowing—slap that guy and he dies, you still killed him even if someone with a normal skull would’ve been fine.Edit: The Snickers comparison is a much better one, thank you. I rescind my point.
That’s a misleading comparison.
The product in question in principle is safe and was used as intended. That the kid died from it, has nothing to do with the product itself. Snicker’s wouldn’t be pulled, if someone with unknown peanut allergy died from eating one.
THAT’S a misleading comparison.
The One Chip isn’t dangerous due to allergens per se, but compounds which can have a strong effect on people’s internal biology the same way a pharmaceutical would especially in the concentrations they’re using to get the super spicy outcome. Regardless of whether the kid had a preexisting condition if the chip’s affect on his body caused changes which contributed to his death then there could be others out there who would have similar complications and as the product continues to gain popularity there is increasing liklihood of such things happening.
These things aren’t tested for safety in any way. Hell, a 14 year old was able to get ahold of the product with presumably no issues.
Paqui is being safe by recalling the product, and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this before anyone else is hurt.
These things aren’t tested for safety in any way.
What the fuck are you talking about? Have you not heard of the FDA? 😂
Yeah I suppose that statement was a little broader than it needed to be. Since you can’t seem to pick up on context clues, I’ll spell it out for you: the FDA is not going to put every single food product to market through rigorous testing like you would for a pharmaceutical (nor should they). They are going to weigh in on the overall safety of the ingredients used and that the product is generally safe.
They aren’t going to evaluate whether there are potential harms or comorbodities for every single slice of the population, which could lead to complications for products like the One Chip which have high concentrations of potentially harmful compounds.
With something like hot sauce you can point to the serving size as a safety factor, but the chip is meant to be eaten all at once.
Again, Paqui is being safe by recalling the product until more information is available.
I think they should follow suit with some of the other extremely spicey foods. A retailer that I used to go to made you sign a waver and required that you prove that you were at least a certain age to buy it. Part of getting the waiver to sign was being told what it can do.
I didn’t buy the hot sauce myself, but the staff explained that it could legitimately burn your skin if you left it on for too long. I wish I remember what the sauce was called.
I was shocked at the time that you had to sign a waver to buy hot sauce. It was a weird concept to me. Incidents like this must be why. It makes sense, now that I think about it.
For real… going back to the snickers comment, their version of the FDA would pull any food that anybody could be allergic to.
I’ll admit when I first was this story I kind of rolled my eyes at it, but the more you look into it the more it makes sense.
An unfortunate tragedy, a kid lost his life. That’s terrible and we should do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Tried a bite when a friend bought it a few years back. And… I can totally see it.
My eyes were watering, my nose immediately started leaking, and I think I inhaled a small amount of dust. All while coughing from the pain. Someone with preexisting conditions who was too dumb/peer pressured to wash it down with water/milk could totally die from that. And I would be very okay with an “18 or over” requirement on that.
As for the chip itself: I love spicy food. But shit like this and The Last Dab aren’t spicy. They are just “hot”. If all you want is the adrenaline rush of poisoning yourself with capsaicin, have fun. But I want my spice to enhance the flavor of what I am eating. Rather than just immediately overload my body. Spices are meant to flavor things.
You’re supposed to put a couple dabs of the last dab into a pot of chili. That’s when it adds the right amount of flavor and heat. Eating it straight is what gets you.
So dilute it and then mask it with as many other flavors as possible? Sounds about right…
I would need to check, but my general preference for a table sauce to “make food spicy” is in the hundred thousands range, but I’ve enjoyed a few Carolina Reaper (million-ish) sauces more as an accent to something else (fried foods really are amazing with hot sauces). Like, not gonna be dunking my chips in there on movie night but more than willing to use them to spice up a lazy wings or whatever night.
The Last Dab and similar “hottest sauces in the world” very rarely have a good flavor of their own. Partially because it is really hard to maximize you scoville count without being a REALLY thick (often “grainy”) sauce. And partially because you are more or less overloading your tastebuds immediately. So why waste time dialing in on the flavors that chili peppers enhance?
And this is a pretty common refrain with The Last Dab especially. I think even some of the Hot Ones staff have even talked about how it is actually a bad sauce and you should only eat it if you want the pain.
Are you sure you aren’t talking about Da Bomb? The Last Dab isn’t that bad.
Possible? I am not a fan of either, but “Da Bomb” is a lot hotter so that would probably line up.
You must be mistaking Last Dab for something else. It’s really hot but it also tastes great. It’s one of those sauces that I can’t eat much of because of the heat but I’m constantly coming back to because the flavor is excellent.
Yup. I’ve tried so many of the different high end hot sauces. I love them. I tried this back in I think 2020. On one hand, glad I did it. It’s a challenge. On the other hand, I don’t think I would do it again.
But the chip they use now is supposed to be even hotter. Like at some point it really does become a health concern. Especially for people who aren’t used to super hot foods. Even my brother, who can also keep up on the hot sauces, complained that it made his stomach hurt for a good hour.
Yeah. It definitely does not help that, even now, the average “white person” thinks salt and pepper is “spice”, taco bell gives them an upset stomach, and that you only break out the lowry’s on REALLY special occasions.
Like, a really good friend of mine for decades at this point is afraid of Cholula.
Just to make it clear. If people don’t like spicy food, that is fine. I do suspect what they don’t like is “hot” food, but, whatever.
But don’t go from “This bell pepper is a bit spicy” to a million on the Scoville scale with a “bit much” table sauce. Let alone whatever the hell these chips are at.
The Taco Bell stomach is more likely food poisoning than anything remotely spicy.
No, that is just casual racism.
Its because taco bell tends to have a modicum of seasoning and high fiber content. Fiber makes you poop and people decide that not being constipated constantly means they have diarrhea.
It is similar to “Chinese food is not filling and msg gives you a headache” in terms of dumbasses deciding the solution to their horrible diet is to be racist to everyone else.
Do you think Taco Bell is representative of actual Mexican food? Blaming Taco Bell isn’t racist, its blaming shit tier food
It is representative of texmex in the same way mcdonald’s is representative of a burger or a slim jim is representative of beef jerky. Although, funny enough, there is a much bigger focus on beans over meat (which is why taco bell is actually a decent fast food option if you are vegetarian but don’t mind trace amounts of animal products).
But in terms of marketing and racists talking about how it gives them the shits (which is also related to “ethnic” food), it is categorized as “mexican”.
Dude what the fuck are you smoking. You need to chill out 8 notches.
I do get hungry pretty fast after Chinese food, but I always felt it was because the food was so damn good I simply wanted more of it.
Wow. You are just full of terrible takes and mistakes in this thread…
I love seeing pictures that white people post of their food talking about how excited they are and it looks like there’s not a flake of seasoning on that. I don’t get how they live like that.
I had one of these chips too. It was really bad for like 10-15 minutes and then it was okay.
Also cholula slaps
Habanero tastes pretty great, but the heat is far too much for me. Like most people, I have to have it dialed down to enjoy the flavor.
Someone let me try their “Dumbass Hot Sauce” and it was very spicy, with a gross bitter taste to it. It’s made for people to show off in front of others. It’s not an enjoyable taste.
This seems like the latter kind of food. It’s not spicy as a result of trying to make something that tastes great, it sounds like it was made to be spicy as a marketing gimmick. It sounds like that coffee with “death” in the name that I hear taste nasty. It has added caffeine. It’s meant to have the highest amount of caffeine as a gimmick, not to taste good.
Some of us genuinely like that level of heat. My go to is Dave’s Gourmet “insanity sauce” since it’s incredibly hot, but also has a nice flavor.
Spices are meant to flavor things.
Amen.
I actually quite like the flavor of the last dab, but it’s not a sauce you can be generous with. Anything with extract in it I avoid.
I’ve honestly thrown away whole bottles because I forgot to check for extracts. Tastes terrible. If I’m gonna be eating something super hot, it better taste at least decent. Or just no taste because the heat overrides it.
Anything using extract also feels much hotter than the scoville level would suggest, and it always goes straight to the back of my throat. It’s not even hot, it just hurts and tastes like shit. Extract is the worst, don’t put OC spray in my hot sauce!
Same. I think the Last Dab has great flavor. All the Hot Ones sauces are actually really delicious, imo.
I’ve not had one from them that I dislike, and they tend to use good ingredients. As for the last dab, I already really like the flavor of the Carolina reaper, and the Apollo is just great for that. They do a generally good job with balancing their heat/flavor for their sauces, too.
My first guess was that he died of pneumonia from aspirating chip dust. The actual case sounds like something that seriously needs a warning. Young healthy people don’t think of stomach ache as potentially lethal and the package should make clear that it is dangerous.
Yes. Proper labeling, not illegalization ffs.
I just had some Last Dab in my Mac n Cheese last night. It’s fine, just very hot, but it tastes good. Sauces from that show that are actually just stupid hot are like, Da Bomb Beyond Insanity, Classic Pepper X Edition, and Taco Vibes Only. Those are made specifically to be too hot.
That last paragraph is why I don’t like Tobasco. It’s not flavorful. It’s just heat and vinegar. Better as an assault deterrent than as food. Dave’s has some good sauces, but the Insanity Sauce is not one of them, for the same reason.
As a sauce, I think tobasco is crap. MUCH better table sauces that you can leave out without worrying about your nephew crying because he drank a scotch bonnet.
But as an ingredient to fix something? Tobasco is awesome. It is basically just liquefied red pepper flakes. So if a meat sauce or something else that you can’t really taste until it is “done” needs a bit of spice, you can adjust a lot more easily without having chunks of peppers or grainy chili powder and so forth. Obviously doesn’t replace “doing it right” but… not everyone has the luxury of being able to make the same dish twelve times before starting recording for a video.
Seriously. Tobasco is an awesome tool to fix a meal. But to whoever actually loves that stuff, check out some other sauces on your supermarket shelf. They don’t have to be super spicy to be good. I made fun of Cholula in this thread but I also love that on a breakfast sandwich. Not much spicier but a LOT more flavorful and with a consistency that sticks to food rather than just runs off.
*Tabasco
I don’t like Tobasco either, but I feel like for the opposite reason. The flavor is the problem, while I love a similarly vinegary hot sauce like Louisiana which I’d say has less other flavor
Same, I don’t like the taste of Tobasco. I like Valentina hot sauce. It’s very mild, but I love the flavor. I usually use it to slather burritos or put in tacos. It also makes an ok hot wing sauce when mixed with butter.
Tabasco sauce tastes super sweet to me. Like pure sugar.
It’s not good.
I don’t understand how people see this as showing off, putting stuff in your mouth that you and your body don’t want to be there. Like, why not eat a piece of shit and some stink bugs? Oh right because it’s fucking stupid.
It’s the same reason people do things like skydiving. Just cause you’re not into it, doesn’t mean it’s stupid.
But doing it for internet points sure as fuck is
I can understand the thrill of skydiving, even though I’ve never done it and probably never will. And I can understand enjoying good hot food, because I do. But making something hot just for the sake of being hot, and daring people to eat it just to say they can seems pretty pointless.
Stupid me. That’s right because skydiving causes nothing but pain.
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Thank you because I definitely said they’re the same.
The NYT has additional information that may add context.
Harris Wolobah is not the first child who has sought medical care after eating the chip. School officials in California and Texas told the “Today” show website last year that students had been taken to the hospital after eating one.
Also last year, about 30 public school students in Clovis, N.M., experienced health issues after eating the chip, KOB-TV of Albuquerque reported. As a preventive measure, the Huerfano School District in Colorado banned the chips, according to a post on its Facebook page.
In a 2020 study, researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center detailed the “serious complications” that can result from eating the Carolina Reaper pepper, noting that a 15-year-old boy had suffered an acute cerebellar stroke two days after eating one on a dare. The Carolina Reaper has been measured at more than two million Scoville heat units, the scale used to measure how hot peppers are. The Naga Viper has been measured at just under 1.4 million Scoville units. Jalapeño peppers are typically rated at between 2,000 and 8,000 units.
But that has not stopped the curious.
Colin Mansfield of Beaumont, Calif., and his nephew Cole Roe, 15, ate the chip together over FaceTime and Mr. Mansfield shared the video on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Mansfield, who makes his own hot sauce, said that it was like a “really spicy curry” and that the heat began to wear off after about 10 minutes. (His nephew, he said, needed a drink after 30 seconds.)
But that’s when another side effect kicked in for both of them: a crippling stomachache.
“I was on the floor, in a fetal position,” Mr. Mansfield said, adding that he wouldn’t have eaten the chip had he known that it would feel as if “somebody put you on the ground and kicked you in the stomach.”
Devin McClain and Jade Dian, who live in Houston, said they had also experienced stomach pains after recording themselves eating the chip — and then chasing it with water, milk and ice cream — for their YouTube channel.
“It was instant pain,” Ms. Dian said. “The milk was not helping, the ice cream was not helping.”
Mr. McClain said that even after the intensity of the heat had faded in his mouth, he could still feel it in his body.
“You could feel it spread; that’s the worst part, honestly,” he said.
Clearly the stomachache response is not unheard of. In addition, stomach distress can be a symptom of anaphylaxis. I have to wonder if it’s people with very, very mild allergies to capsaicin and the amount and strength in these peppers are pushing it into extreme allergic reaction. One thing that gets me wondering is that nothing listed in the ingredients, to my admittedly limit knowledge, should turn your tongue blue. So how are they achieving that, what ingredient is not listed? When trying to find out through Googling it, I found even more cases of people getting hospitalized because of the chip, especially teenagers, in previous years.
In the chili-head community, these stomach aches are well known as “cap cramps” (capsaicin cramps) and it happens to just about everyone while building a tolerance to capsaicin. Over time and continued eating of mega hot stuff, these cap cramps get less severe and the amount of capsaicin ingested in order to trigger cap cramps increases as tolerance builds.
Competitive pepper eaters actually make themselves vomit after eating large amounts of super hots in order to avoid the cap cramps, they can last for double-digit hours to if enough is consumed.
These cap cramps send a lot of folks to the hospital if they don’t know any better, but they haven’t been life threatening for healthy adults. The data just isn’t there for that.
A lot of people will also over indulge on dairy thinking they are helping the burn in their mouth, but drink a half gallon of milk in one sitting and it upsets stomachs, too.
I’d be interested in knowing how the study at the University of Mississippi directly correlated the stroke to the hot pepper a full two days after ingesting, that seems like a stretch to me. What is it about the mechanism of capsaicin on receptors that would cause a stroke?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7136587/
This is the study. There was no stroke for this person, but what they call reversible cerebrovascular vasoconstriction syndrome. He presented two days after the pepper, after football practice, for a headache that wouldn’t go away.
The study never says the pepper caused the issue, but it is hypothesized.
Further, if you dig into the links in the study of other examples of extreme reactions to hot peppers, you have
A) esophageal rupturing after a bout of violent retching a vomiting after eating a ghost pepper
B) acute myocardial infarction and coronary vasospasm by someone taking cayenne pepper pills for weight loss where the abstract is just postulating capsaicin was the cause, but end of the day dude was taking diet pills
C) some nothing burger abstract about someone having a thunderclap headache after eating a super hot
There isn’t even an adequate sample size to be statistically significant with regards to capsaicin being the root cause for any of these issues, not to mention none of these studies are actually confirming their abstract to any reasonable degree.
I’m not saying the chip didn’t lead to this young man losing his life, but there is no worthwhile scientific data pointing to that being a legitimate reason. This is an outlier case I’m interested in the outcome and I feel for the young man’s family, but my hypothesis is that we’ll find out any correlation to the one chip challenge will only be tangentially related.
So how are they achieving that, what ingredient is not listed?
Ingredients I see (at least on the search result from the official website, likely cached) say blue corn and blue 1.
The page itself with talk of the 2023 version doesn’t list anything about blue (and explicitly says in the FAQ that there’s no dye), so maybe they gave up on that.
I read elsewhere that the 2023 chip does in fact no longer include the blue coloring.
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Vibrant?
Not a bright color, dark and foreboding.
People are calling this kid stupid. I disagree.
Nobody buying food in America would think that a single serving product would be able to kill you without any sort of prior health conditions. This is a completely fair assumption and one that is important.
Second, the one chip challenge has been in the public eye for a while. There are multiple examples of people eating them successfully in previous years. When things do go badly, it’s usually something along the lines of “I threw up everywhere”. That’s a far cry from dying and along the lines of risks teenagers have taken for decades.
Third, a ton of food items use the skull and crossbones motif. I’ve seen it on hot sauces that aren’t even that spicy. Nobody assumes that the skull and crossbones means risking death. This is, again, because everyone assumes that food is generally safe to eat.
In conclusion, don’t sell things in convenience stores that can kill an otherwise healthy person in short order. While this is especially true for children, it’s a good rule of thumb in general.
The chip has been safe to eat for millions of people for years.
Capsaicin consumed orally isn’t fatal. This kid probably has some other underlying health problems he was simply not aware of, but it’s not like it’s an inherently lethal product. If a kid with an unknown peanut allergy eats and dies from a Snickers, it’s not like Snickers are actually a lethal food.
It does say it’s intended for adults only, but that’s hardly ever stopped teenagers from doing anything ever. It’s probably good they pulled it temporarily, but the real answer here is probably simply “Don’t sell this to minors.”
there is also the possibility that the ship was contaminated with some at the factory. Maybe a cleaning chemical got in the chip
Why are people taking it for granted that peppers can kill you? They almost never, if ever, do. No, they can’t, in a practical sense, and it’s very weird you’re immediately ready to believe that they do
Do you know anything about nightshades? Cause they’ve been killing people for thousands of years.
Confidently incorrect I see. How many people died from tomatoes / peppers since written history began? I’m guessing approximately zero.
“Theoretically, one could eat enough really hot chiles to kill you,” he says. “A research study in 1980 calculated that three pounds of extreme chilies in powder form — of something like the Bhut Jolokia — eaten all at once could kill a 150-pound person.”
So yeah probably the same number of people who died of a weed overdose. Another thing that is technically possible.
No need to guess, about 70 people die each year from eating green potatoes.
The “nightshades” in this product are most likely tomatoes, not the deadly nightshades you’re thinking of.
Have you ever known anyone who died of nightshade?
No, they don’t. I’d be surprised if there were 3 documented cases ever.
Mostly because anything that actually has a significant amount of solanine in it, like tomato greens, or datura leaves, or bittersweet nightshade berries, tastes like absolute crap and you would have to force yourself to eat it to poisoning.
Sounds like a garbage opinion from a 4 year old who refuses to eat 75% of modern cuisine
Third, a ton of food items use the skull and crossbones motif. I’ve seen it on hot sauces that aren’t even that spicy.
Even regular water can have morbid branding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Death
I thought this is the kind of thing the FDA is for. If it can kill a 14 year old then why was it allowed?
Pretty sure that’s the law actually
Meh.
Even as someone who loves really spicy foods, I think the ever-escalating spicy trend is getting ridiculous. After a certain point you don’t taste anything and its just a dumb one-upsmanship contest.
People would litterly send men to the moon just to one up each other.
Same. Also some people just don’t seem to be able to identify any flavor beneath the heat.
My limit is this one Asian food place in Houston. I got some chicken that I didn’t realize was hot. Me and my coworkers go back to the office (a very large room). I open that to go box and everyone in the room choked from the heat of just the smell. It was strong even from the other side of this room that’s probably 80x80ft room with 40ft ceilings.
I was crying, sweating, turning red, nose running everything. Everybode else was getting a little bit of bloodshot eyes.
Of course then everyone tried convincing me to eat the pepper itself. Ain’t no way.
When I was finished we wraped it in like 3 plastic bags and took it outside and down the sidewalk and put it in a trashcan there.
But that was some damn good chicken. 5 stars, would suffer again.
Sounds like you all had a great time.
You don’t eat this chip because it’s good, you eat it because it’s one of the spiciest things you can get (and it’s fun).
This is an extreme example. Plenty of other things out there are just a dumb pissing contest to see who can make the hottest sauce, wings, chip, ribs, etc.
I looove hot and spicy foods and refuse to take part in any of that nonsense.
People look at me like I’m crazy and I have to explain that, yes, I like hot and spicy flavors but that doesn’t mean I’d eat a spoonful of godamn lava.
I enjoy watching people do it though and always offer to buy drinks for someone who does it, lol.
As a lover of spicy foods, and more importantly, a late 30s fella, I agree completely. If you don’t enjoy it, what’s the point?
I’m tired of restaurants basically wafting a Carolina Reaper over their salsas or sauces and advertising their barely-jalapeno-grade garbage as being particularly spicy. One drop of extract in a bulk batch of sauce for a restaurant does not make it spicy, but it certainly lets vanilla consumers with no real tolerance feel like they’re able to take actual heat from real peppers.
I love spicy food and I’ve done the One Chip Challenge just for the thrill, but it’s not really done as a “food” any more than skydiving is done for transportation. It arguably shouldn’t be sold to minors, but it’s actually hot, not just marketing, and arguably is more responsible for creating the trend in the first place than jumping on the bandwagon later. The Challenge has been sold for a long time.
I think Popeyes or Wendy’s was advertising some ghost pepper sandwich recently and it was decent and had a little bit of a kick, but it was far from being hot. Same thing with various “hot” chips.
If it is a mass market brand I have very low expectations when it comes to spice level. If it had the slightest vit of a kick, I’m surprised.
It was Wendy’s and it really wasn’t that hot. They also had “Ghost Pepper Ranch” for the nuggets and it’s really mild.
It’s not really sold as a food. It’s sold as a game. That’s why it’s called the “one chip challenge”. You’re supposed to eat it and then hold out as long as possible without driving something to sedate the burn.
It’s also not that spicy. Last time I had it, I was mostly coughing from the stale chip and dry, powdery seasoning. The heat itself didn’t bother me. Their regular sized bags of chips were way spicier to me.
More responsible than gun manufacturers.
The point of chips is to feed you the point of a gun is to kill. Why would they pull their product for doing what it’s supposed to.
I agree with you though.
The chips were sold individually, and their seasoning included two of the hottest peppers in the world: the Carolina Reaper and the Naga Viper.
Each chip was packaged in a coffin-shaped container with a skull on the front.
This is about the most wasteful product I’ve ever encountered. You wrap one chip in plastic to keep it fresh and then throw cardboard around it with tons of empty space and then ship those on trucks?! What the fuck.
I support killing this product on its environmental harm whether it’s implicated in the teen’s death or not.
One of my favorite bits from Futurama is when Fry is using some “make your own Oreo cookie” device that has individually wrapped cookies and individually wrapped cream, so he’d open each one, toss the plastic, smush them together just to take them apart like some people do with Oreos.
Hilarious and horrifying because you just know we have products like that today lol
Great reference. I remember that and it made me smile in horror.
On a ‘plastic per calories’ scale this is very wasteful indeed. But actually it is not just a chip, its more of an activity being sold. Other activities are much worse resource-wise. Some people go skydiving, others eat a chip at home.
Yeah, it’s not actually a food. Nobody eats these for the taste or calories. It’s purely for the experience of the challenge and the packaging is understandably part of that experience. It’s still wasteful, but it’s the kind of society we live in. Packaging works. If they could sell as well with less waste, I’m sure they would. The packaging is a calculated attempt at maximizing the experience, especially under the assumption that it’s going to spread by viral videos.
Don’t check out Japan
But hey, they have square watermelons!
Tbf I would assume there’s not much volume being sold, considering it’s definitely at most a serving being packaged. Afaik nobody is out there buying a handful of these to eat as a snack.
EDIT: based on the other comments, it seems like the average consumer buys at most one of these in their lifetime, haha.
Yeah, this sounds like a case where if they packaged it like other chips, it would just mean instead of throwing out a small amount of plastic per chip eaten, you’re throwing out a chip bag worth of plastic along with most of the other chips after you and maybe some friends take one.
It’s like buying the bigger size that’s slightly more expensive only to realize it would have been cheaper to buy the smaller one because the extra stuff got thrown out after it went bad plus there’s extra packaging, even if the value per unit is worse.
I try to explain this to my wife every time she buys the humongous restaurant-size jar of mayonnaise… “But it was buy 2 get one half off…”
I exaggerate, but only slightly.
Eh. It is no different than a lot of snack packages. Wrap each serving/couple servings in plastic and then put it in a bag or a box. It is egregious because it is a single chip. But that is one “serving” of the chip.
Of all the things wrong with these kinds of products, the packaging seems fine. Plastic for freshness, cardboard for durability.
That said, it very much brings to mind the futurama gag where the cookies and the creme are all individually wrapped to eat oreos. But this is not that.
This was my first thought. This must be peak “we don’t give a shit if our climate will kill us tomorrow”
Idk how the legal accusations stand up, as there are warnings and liability disclaimers everywhere on it…
I’ve eaten it, most of my friends have, and we were fine. But I’ve known others who reacted much more strongly to just a crumb, so I can see how with preexisting conditions that could happen.
In doing some research, I found that there have been quite a few people reporting stomacheaches and being hospitalized from previous years of the chip. There’s also been a case of 15 year old dying from a stroke caused by the Carolina Reaper pepper. I hate to say it, but I think that maybe we’re taking these peppers too far to the point that they are becoming hazardous to our health.
Wanting to prove how tough you are to others who may or may not even care has always been hazardous to one’s health. We’re only about a decade past a challenge to eat laundry detergent.
No amount of liability disclaimers will protect you if you sell your products to 14 year olds
That sound like someone with a trench coat selling chip to kids on a dark corner with flickering light.
Marketing an outright painful food product to teenagers by framing it as a social media “challenge” is a bit scummy, frankly.
they’re spicy but not that spicy. maybe he had some sort of allergic reaction?
Capsaicin is a neurotoxin but an allergy makes more sense. He collapsed, so anaphylaxis?
I am not a doctor but I like to play one with Google searches.
I’ve watched House, I can confidently say it was definitely not Lupus
Except for that one time it was
Exception to prove the rule.
Lol my favorite recent story to tell people lately is that I got diagnosed with lupus a monthish ago. Prior to the suggestion, I had been watching House again. The universe was just like, “fuck you” lol
It was obviously sarcoidosis!
I haven’t tried the “one chips” but are you sure you aren’t thinking of their regular ghost pepper chips?
Actually, I found that putting them in the freezer gives them a really lovely delayed affect, where you can very slowly feel the spice picking up.
Shame about that kid, though. I can’t imagine the sorrow :(
anyone born after 2008 can’t cook… all they know is mcdonald’s , charge they phone, play Roblox, eat hot chip & die
I enjoyed your downvoted meme reference.
I feel bad for laughing. It’s offical. We are both bad people.
And talk shit over wifi cause they phone never on.
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anyone born after 2008
Anyone born after 2008 would be under 15, most children can’t cook.
If you can’t cook even a basic meal by the time you’re a teenager, your parents are fucking up.
My parents finished fucking up, Im doing the fucking up now
Depends what you mean by “cook a basic meal”. Under 15, I would expect someone to be able to feed themselves ie put someone in the microwave and assemble a basic meal, but I wouldn’t expect them to be able to cook most things from scratch. If nothing else, teenagers are lazy and with the amount of effort it takes to get them to cook a meal you’ll probably end up just doing it yourself.
that th joke
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I had the hottest one one time and legitimately thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I ate it around 1PM and my entire rest of my day was gone to extreme sickness like I’ve never experienced before. To this day I get very sick feeling any time I smell something similar to it.
I love spicy foods but the super hot peppers are just different. Even a small amount in food where it doesn’t taste spicy will wreck my gi tract for at least 24 hours. Shit ain’t natural
They aren’t meant for people who enjoy flavor. They’re meant for dudebros who are cripplingly insecure in their masculinity and feel a constant need to prove themselves, even though no one gives a shit. The same people who buy dude wipes and giant pickups.
Or they’re just people like me who like to hurt themselves once in a while with of friends, and commiserate at our poor choices. I don’t have a single friend who’s a “dudebro”, and I don’t drive a truck. Shove your stupid prejudices in your asshole along with a Carolina Reaper.
I bought kits like this for my 14 year old bil for Christmas last year because he’s like this. I desperately hope it’s all a phase
this is hands down a ‘shit happens’ events. its not always someones fault someone gets hurt.
Goes to show that we know so little still about gut biology.
Any idea how many scovilles these things are?
It wasn’t too long ago that I had a habit of using 600,000 scoville unit hot sauce on things. Now I’m wondering if I was taking my life in my hands every time I had that sauce.
Likely more than 2 million.
The kid likely had a preexisting condition or maybe some genetic disposition as hundreds if not thousands of people eat food at that heat level each day without incident.
Or it had nothing to do with the chip at all. The article says that the cause of death hasn’t been determined yet.
It was obviously a contributing factor.
If you built up to it and you don’t get a negative reaction youll be fine. Spouse eats super spicy, to me, just fine. I’ll occassionally put a little of it and I’m get a runny nose, flop sweat and a bowel movement with half an hour after eating. These people probably dont eat a lot of spicy food. Its like running a marathon straight from being a couch potato. Your body is not ready for that.
The article says:
Carolina Reapers score around 1.7 million Scoville heat units and Naga Viper peppers around 1.4 million.
I’ve had dried naga pepper in food a few times, it’s not nice. It burns all the way through, I could feel it burning in my stomach. I ended up throwing up rather than dealing with it. I’ll gladly stick to the much tastier scotch bonnets (100-350k SHU).
A fresh Carolina Reaper ranks somewhere around 1.6 million scoville. I grew a bush of em last year, they’re evil little things. I ended up just composting them.
