In case you didn't know Tennesse is the hot chicken capital of the United States. The popularity of it grows each year and new hot chicken spots keep popping up all over Nashville, which is THE PLACE in Tennessee to get your chicken fix...specifically east Nashville. I recently read a very indepth article about the beginning of hot chicken in Nashville. The article did a great job of telling the story of one particular hot chicken joint, seregation in Nashville and what one person thinks is how hot chicken became popular. In the article the author basically surmises that the rich white people in Nashville never heard of hot chicken until the last few years because of segregation. This guy has no clue what he is talking about. You see hot chicken and hot food isn't a black thing. Let me shead some light on this.
First of all I come from a blue collar family. Well red neck is a better term. My grandfather on my mothers side was a farmer...a fix it yourself guy...a real man kinda guy. He comes from the last generation of men who can fix whatever is broken. He is the oldest of ten children I believe. (Give or take) so needless to say there wasn't a lot of extra money floating around.....and how do you think my grandfather likes his food? Let's just say hot is an understatement.
This is a man who I personally witnessed eat hot peppers off of the vine. No water, just to see if they are 'hot enough' yet. Who does that? He collects hot sauces like some people collect baseball cards. He was in the hospital once for a bleeding stomach ulcer, I'm not saying hot sauce put him there...but damn. The fact is you will always find a prevalence of hot sauce/hot foods in poorer communities, world wide. I haven't exactly figured out the correlation but believe me it does exist. I have an idea about why this happens though.
When you are poor, really poor..I don't mean McDonald's poor...I mean beans and rice poor, your food gets really boring. I mean think about eating the same dishes day in and day out. What would be an inexpensive way to add flavor and taste to your otherwise bland food? Hot sauce, pepper, chilies, ect, of course. At some point it becomes a novelty, even to the people who eat it regularly. A badge of courage so to speak. Who can stand the hottest of the hot? This is a thing in poor communities everywhere. It's easy to see how a hot chicken (fried chicken was the first foods to offered in a take me home sort of way, small rural towns often had take home chicken way before burger joints) place
would be popular in the 40's and continue in popularity all the way to today. It's basically a combination of poor people food. Tasty, amazing, poor people food.
Let's now focus on Nashville..the birth place...ok the place where hot chicken became a popular thing. Let's talk about how that happened. First of all Nashville has always been a place full of money...for a small group of people. Seriously at one point in time Nashville was one of the preppiest cities I'd ever seen. Hello vanderbuilt, Belmont and David lipscomb universities. Across town, for years though..there was a group of people who didnt make that kind of cash and they liked their food..suprise, suprise..just as my grandpa likes his...hot. Then about say, ten years ago, before the real estate crash....upper middle class people started moving to the east side...flipping houses and generally turning it into hipster city. ...and where did these hipsters go to eat? The long standing hot chicken joints, which because of the influx of people to the area suddenly were 'discovered' and gained in popularity.
So why does most of Tennessee like hot food....because most of Tennessee is poor. That is the answer. It has nothing to do with segregation..other than the normal segregation of classes that always occurs. People, make that poor people, have been eating hot chicken for a long, long time.
I like how the article I read talks about how the author was from Nashville but had never heard of it and how his friends were now moving to parts of Nashville they wouldn't have stepped foot in years ago, which basically confirms what I just said. Im not sure why it annoys me, but for some reason the east Nashville hipsters do. It's like they are urban explorers discovering things that have been around for decades or their suprise at their 500k 900sqft home next to the projects getting broken into.
No east Nashville hipsters you were not the first people to like hot food, drink pbr, or shop at goodwill...but I'm sure everyone making money off you is happy to let you stay in your delusion.
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