The most American restaurant experience

When I was in college, my friends and I would often journey to hot wings restaurants that required you to sign a waiver when ordering certain menu items. (These menu items were sometimes advertised as being literally too hot to handle: the extra-hot wings would come with plastic gloves in case you didn’t want to have them come into contact with your skin while eating them, though I never saw anyone actually using the plastic gloves.)

From what I’ve gathered, this is a distinctly American experience. One possible interpretation of this is that only America would have the consumer demand for a hot wing containing enough capsaicin that its consumers might possibly require medical attention. And indeed, America does seem to have a unique fascination with making things impossibly spicy: Capsicum chinense is native to central America, but the people who selectively bred it until they developed the famous Carolina Reaper were (as you might surmise from the name) located in South Carolina.  (Pepper X and Butch T, two other contenders for world’s hottest pepper, are cultivars of the same species of pepper hailing from South Carolina and Mississippi, respectively.)

The Carolina Reaper, as seen on Hot Ones and many other YouTube eating challenge videos

However, the fact that many of the contenders for “world’s hottest peppers” have come from America have less to do with the fact that Americans have a thing for spicy foods, and more with the fact that Americans love competitions in which someone can be crowned a “winner.” This applies to the breeders who are vying for the title of “world’s hottest pepper,” and it also applies to the consumers: the hot wings place where you have to sign a waiver is just one among many American establishments to offer “stunt foods.” If you don’t want to eat a wing whose spiciness is measured in millions of Scoville heat units, you can instead visit the Los Vegas Heart Attack Grill, which offers the 8,000 calorie quadruple bypass burger with four pounds of American beef.

This kind of menu item is not food, it is a challenge. And you don’t show up to take the challenge without an audience.  That provides ample commercial reason for establishments to offer these items, because the kind of people who seek them out usually bring along friends, particularly usually the type of friends who are going to order alcohol and other high-margin items while they witness you engaging in activities that could put you in the hospital (and the fact that they could put you in the hospital is the entire point).

Which is to say, while America is home to many of the world’s hottest peppers, Americans don’t really have a thing for spicy food so much as they have a thing for total lack of moderation.

But when you go to the hot wings place and sign the form to absolve the eating establishment of any legal liability for the consequences of your actions, there’s another thing that’s uniquely American about it: the very act of signing a waiver. Because while we Americans love our stunt foods, we apparently also like lawsuits just as much.

Is the waiver is part of the product?

Okay, maybe the waiver is there just to disclaim legal liability. But there’s also something else going on here.

There’s an episode of the Comedy Central reality TV show Nathan for You, where Nathan Fielder’s “wacky outside-the-box marketing idea” to help a local struggling business was to create an experience so terrifying that it would cause them to make headlines.

“What is the best press a haunted house can get?” Nathan rhetorically asks the business owner, before answering his own question: “I want your haunted house to be so scary that someone sues you for being too scary.” (Nathan then spends the rest of the episode executing a scheme that is designed to terrify guests into think that they’re actually going to die so that he can then persuade them to sue the haunted house.)

The thing is, you don’t actually have to get sued to sell potential customers the idea that your product is so dangerous that it’s flirting with the limits of legal safety. Having a waiver allows you to have the allure of offering a borderline illicit product without the need to actually get sued. (In theory, it actually prevents you from getting sued, though it won’t save you from charges of gross negligence.)

If one of your patrons is taking on the “hottest wing” challenge to prove how tough they are, the least you can do is help sell their group on the idea of how dangerous and edgy they’re being by having them sign a waiver to show that they’re eating a a truly intense food only intended for the most intense daredevils. When you bring out the waiver for them to sign, you’re not subjecting them to bureaucratic red tape; you’re inviting them to play their role in a theatrical performance that’s designed to impress onlookers.

Theater is a huge part of the “food challenge” experience. No establishment understands this better than the aforementioned Heart Attack Grill, where the patrons are given hospital gowns, and the waitstaff all dress like nurses (or a Halloween costume approximation thereof). Being wheeled out to the parking lot in a wheelchair is a privilege reserved for those who manage to ingest the 8,000 calorie burger in a single sitting.

If I were to pen an aggrandizing line in the narrative of those who face eating challenges, it might go something like this: “Most people see danger and run away. But there are some people who see danger and walk toward it. We have a word for those people: heroes.”

Perhaps this is a misuse of the word hero, as putting your own wellbeing at risk kind of loses its sheen when you’re doing it for attention, or thrills, or some other non-altruistic purpose. When Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces, famously describing the “monomyth,” he described it as a journey of facing challenges and undergoing transformation, not necessarily a journey of helping others.

People who intentionally seek out challenges to conquer are, in a sense, announcing to the world what type of person they want to be, and every act they take is part of constructing the narrative of how they embody that self-image. Eventually, they return from their conquest, changed by the experience. If you were to tell a story about them, it would be exactly what Joseph Campbell describes as a hero’s journey.

A critical part of the hero’s journey, after one has answered the call to adventure, is to take the important step of dramatically crossing the threshold into a world of challenge by leaving the Shire, taking the red pill, or signing the waiver that says “I consent to receiving whatever obscenely spicy food you are about to serve me.”