As difficult as it is to trace the origin stories of the use of bitter ingredients, it seems safe to assume that it was often the result of necessity: In times of scarcity, you learn to make do with anything edible. Over time, however, eating bitter foods became not only traditional but in some cases even philosophical, revealing of a culture’s resilience: In China, there is a colloquialism that translates literally to “eat bitter,” a metaphor for the ability to endure hardship. Jews eat bitter herbs, usually horseradish, at Passover seders, to remind themselves of the suffering endured by their ancestors. On the Japanese island of Okinawa, a ubiquitous stir-fry of egg, tofu, pork and bitter melon called goya chanpuru is thought to ensure longevity — suffering in service of a long life.

It’s hard not to see the current worldwide health-food craze as being a convoluted translation of this: If beauty is pain, health, you might say, is bitter. Conscientious eaters choose salads overflowing with raw kale or collard greens; frothy, chalky matcha and “golden lattes” tinged with pungent turmeric. These things are nutritious, yes, but there’s also a psychological element: Bitterness equals raw, which in turn equals purity. Adding sweetness to your coffee or chocolate is a corruption of this purity. And, as with my bitter melon experience, eating bitterness can be a brag: How better to prove your connoisseurship than ordering something whose pleasures are either obscure or nonexistent? To order a drink with no trace of sweetness — say, a hoppy India pale ale or a straight shot of the Italian amaro known as Fernet-Branca, dark, viscous, herbal — is to announce one’s fortitude and disdain for instant gratification. Nothing worth doing is easy, and nothing worth consuming goes down easy. In an age of ready pleasures, choosing something difficult and unlikable is an announcement of sophistication. The craze is born, you might say, from having too much enjoyment.

Danny Bowien, the chef behind Mission Chinese, a restaurant with outposts in New York and San Francisco, is passionate about bitterness, which he describes, affectionately, as “challenging.” Bitter melon not only makes multiple appearances on his menus — most prominently in one of his signature dishes, thrice-cooked bacon with rice cakes — but he also seeks it out elsewhere, including at the taxi-stand Punjabi restaurant across the street from his Lower East Side apartment, where he orders an Indian varietal of the fruit braised in a curry with radish or potato. “It takes something out of you, in a way,” he muses. “The first time you have it your body kind of seizes up. I like that it punches you in the face.” What he calls “abrasive” flavors “break up the experience” of eating.

For Bowien, discovering bitter flavors was thrillingly world-expanding. He grew up in Oklahoma, where food was often sugary, but when he was 19, he left for San Francisco, where he had coffee-braised pork shoulder at a New American restaurant, and beef with bitter melon and fermented black beans at a Chinese restaurant in the Mission, both dishes that changed the way he understood flavor. At his restaurants now, he tries to create “food that really leaves an impression on you, and you can do that in many ways — drama, luxury products, really amazing techniques. But there are a lot of ingredients that up until recently have not really been highlighted within what we cook on a daily basis.” This includes, for example, grapefruit rinds, which Bowien has used to garnish scallop sashimi, giving it a mouth-twisting bite.

The Mexican chef Enrique Olvera, too, has been steadily elevating certain ingredients and recipes not only for the American palate, by way of his New York restaurants, Cosme and Atla, but also for his own countrymen at his Mexico City restaurant, Pujol. There, he serves fine-dining dishes that showcase bitter vegetables like the wild greens known as quintoniles and prickly pear cactus, or nopal — and Pujol is especially known for his dark, rich, intensely complex, intensely acrid mole, aged for over 1,200 days.