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The Rocket Scientist Who Burned Oprah’s Tongue
How a scientist in California created the world’s hottest chili, and helped make humanity’s favorite spice even more popular
In 1985, rocket scientist Frank Garcia was nearing forty, watching his parents struggle to keep their California chili-growing business afloat. Though they were third-generation, Mexican-American farmers, the family’s pepper enterprise faced collapse due to competition from imported Mexican chilis. Everyone was looking to Frank for a solution, but the answer didn’t come to him immediately.
Then one afternoon, while changing planes in Miami after a work trip to Brazil, Garcia bought a travel magazine to read on the connecting flight home. An article stood out — one expounding the growing popularity of habanero peppers. Habaneros are one of five domesticated chili varieties, and are generally considered the hottest as ranked by the Scoville chili pepper heat rating scale. Garcia was shocked to read that hobby gardeners were growing them successfully in locations far away from the plant’s native Cuba. A lightbulb went off in his head: Why not plant them in California, at his parent’s farm, and attempt to create the world’s hottest chili pepper? And so he did, beginning a journey that would last 30 years and change the global chili pepper…
