It might seem uncanny that the very same day Lauren Collins’s piece about “superhot” chili peppers appeared in the magazine—with its mention of the Great Sriracha Shortage of 2007—the California company that makes the beloved hot sauce was hit with a lawsuit. According to the Los Angeles Times, the city of Irwindale, home to the Huy Fong factory since last year, sued the company on Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claiming that the scent of chilis emanating from the building is a public nuisance in violation of municipal code. (Area residents have lodged complaints of headaches and burning eyes and throats.) I thought it was also a strange coincidence when, last week, as I was fact-checking the article, someone happened to give me a small stash of some of the exact peppers I’d been carefully researching, superhot varieties I’d never heard of before reading Collins’s article.

What I’ve realized is not that the world works in mysterious ways but that, more simply, hot chili peppers—and chiliheads, as connoisseurs are known—are everywhere. As Collins wrote, hot-sauce production is one of the ten fastest-growing industries in the country, but I didn’t even notice that I had three kinds of it on my desk (sriracha, Cholula, and Tabasco) until someone pointed it out to me. When I brought my gifted superhots—a bhut jolokia, a.k.a. ghost pepper, and a Trinidad Scorpion—into the office this week, and sent out a mass e-mail daring my colleagues to try them, about two dozen people gathered around the peppers, some game to tentatively pop slivers into their mouths, most willing only to watch and share stories of times they got “burnt up,” a term chiliheads sometimes use to describe the bodily sensation of eating chilis.

Later, a friend sent me a link to Hot Pepper Gaming, a YouTube channel featuring reviews of video games, each delivered by a reviewer who eats an entire hot chili before he or she starts to speak, to hilarious effect. The same friend told me about a dinner he has attended called Hell Night, put on by the East Coast Grill, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which features Pasta from Hell (a painfully spicy Bolognese) and Meatball Roulette, in which everyone at the table gets a meatball, everyone eats at once, and “one person starts sweating profusely.”

A colleague tweeted a photo of the liability waiver participants must sign to enter the “Satan Is Real” wing-eating contest at John Brown Smokehouse, in Long Island City:

I … certify that I am not allergic to peppers of any kind … including but not limited to the following: Trinidad Moruga Scorpions, Naga Vipers, Trinidad Scorpion Butch Ts, Bhut Jolokias, Infiniti Chillis, Scotch bonnets, habañeros, and/or ghost peppers, and/or capsaicin oil.

Another colleague offered to lend me a book of essays by Andrew Weil, which includes one on chilis, and still another brought me a large Ziploc bag filled with fresh chilis she couldn’t use. At a Halloween party, I complimented a woman dressed as a bottle of Huy Fong sriracha, in an oversized red T-shirt bearing the logo and a cap fashioned out of stiff green poster paper.

It should come as no surprise that people everywhere love chilis; as Collins mentions in her story, Paul Rozin, a psychologist who studies taste, has likened chili-eating to such common experiences as riding roller coasters and watching movies we know will make us cry. The body’s negative response to “situations where we realize there is no, or minimal, actual danger,” as Rozin puts it, has wide appeal. Sriracha, in particular, has become deeply ingrained in American culture, perhaps in part because of the growing popularity and influence of Asian food. (Though developed and produced domestically, Huy Fong’s product is based on a ubiquitous Southeast Asian condiment of the same name.) The sauce has earned its own festival and flavor of Lays potato chips—not to mention, in 2012, sixty million dollars for Huy Fong, a company whose revenue, according to David Tran, its founder and C.E.O., has grown about twenty per cent annually.

The L.A. Times interviewed several people in Irwindale who seemed to subtly out themselves as chili lovers. The president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce said she’d taken a tour of the factory and reported, “No burning eyes, no throat constriction, and I’ve had that while cooking chiles at home.” Another local likened what he’d smelled to the scent of cooking chorizo. Huy Fong is safe for now: on Thursday, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge denied Irwindale’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped all production effective immediately. A hearing to consider a preliminary injunction—which would shutter the factory until the company can solve the problem to both the court and the city’s satisfaction—has been set for November 22nd. “If it doesn’t smell, we can’t sell,” Tran told the L.A. Times. “If the city shuts us down, the price of Sriracha will jump a lot,” he added ominously.

But by the time of the hearing, the harvest will be over for the special variety of red jalapeños that Huy Fong uses, which means the factory will be done processing fresh chilis for the year. That chili smell, exaggerated or not, will disappear. By next year’s harvest, who knows? One or more of those irked Irwindale residents might receive an unexpected gift of a bhut jolokia or a Trinidad Scorpion. They might taste a sliver, and then another, and find themselves mysteriously wanting more.

Photograph by Nick Ut/AP.