This week New York's Jacob Javits center hosts the New York Fancy Food Show, a gigantic convention of food manufaturers and their hangers on that offers anyone in the biz a chance to taste what everyone else is doing and talk about them behind their backs (but not very far behind their backs- the Javitz center just ain't that big).

Peeled Snacks of course is represented, and our team has congregated in the Javitz center basement where we get to rub Oprah's face into every passerby (Oprah, I love you).  Conventions are long and silly.  I'm reminded of movies about prisons where all the prisoners mill about the yard and measure one anothers biceps and tatoos.  But no doubt about it, it's all really about the tastings.

Yesterday I wandered from booth to booth sampling all of the wonderful things out there to buy and eat: pre-made Indian dinners, fancy chocolates, exotic teas, 1,000 kind of jerky, 1,000,000 kinds of dipping sauce, cheeses galore, breads abounding, crackers, biscottis, you NAME it, it was there.

 And yet, I feel that I must submit a complaint.

Allright, I wandered around for a while looking for some hot sauce.  That's reasonable enough- people eat chilli and tacos, they need hot sauce.  I tried all the sauces in the louisiana section, I tried them all in Texes, I wandered through the Carribean and  Japan and a bit through Malaysia, looking only for the sauce that would make my forehead bead with sweat and my eyes bulge.

Nada.

I'm convinced, CONVINCED, that we americans are being bred out of our spiciness.  I believe whole-heartedly that there is a coordinated plot to make wimpy the taste buds of our great nation, and to turn us into a society of white-bread eating water-lillies.  We are systematically losing our competative edge thanks to terrible culinary decisions and some arcane plot involving completely un-american sous-chefs and gnome-like sauciers!

 FIGHT this plot- ask for your food to be spicy, and DEMAND that it make you sweat!  Global warming's happening anyway- we'll need the cooling comfort of spicy food soon enough anyway...

 -Ian "EN" K