The One Thing You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Jalapeños

Jelisa Castrodale
Jelisa Castrodale
Jelisa is a freelance writer who has covered food and travel, sports and pop culture for numerous publications. When she's not on deadline, she enjoys getting new passport stamps, collecting records and shouting at her beloved Liverpool Football Club.
updated Apr 30, 2019
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(Image credit: Teri Virbickis)

Sometimes it feels like Twitter only exists so you can see those same four GIFs of Steve Carell-as-Michael Scott a dozen times a day, so fast food restaurants’ social media teams can dunk on each other, and so that guy you went to high school with can type “LOL IT SNOWED TODAY COULD REALLY USE SOME OF THAT GLOBAL WARMING LOL.”

Occasionally, though, you’ll scroll past a legit-good Marie Kondo-related tweet, or you’ll see something like this “Before and After” chart of different kinds of chiles. Writer and editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia posted the photo, which shows how the appearances of six different chiles change after they’ve been dried, and lists their new names as well. When you smoke-dry a jalapeño, for example, it becomes a chipotle — and that sound you just heard was me taking a seat to think about that for a few minutes.

With this one graphic — one that has been liked almost 20,000 times — Moreno-Garcia straight-up blew some minds. “I was today years old when I learned a chipotle was just a dried jalapeño,” one person responded. “You have no idea how embarrassed I am to have been born and raised in southern California and [am] only learning this today,” another said.

But Moreno-Garcia actually suggested that, in addition to a dozen different kinds of peppers, this chart also illustrates one of the challenges of properly understanding — and speaking about — another culture. “This alone is a good answer when ppl ask ‘can I write about another culture other than my own?'” she wrote. “Sure. But remember something as seemingly simple as a hot pepper can be very complex. Barging in like the Kool-Aid Man can be difficult.”

So, wait, one Tweet just gave us not one, but two positive takeaways? What GIF am I supposed to post when that happens?