When Do Hot Peppers Stop Being Food?

Several news outlets are reporting that the world record holder for hottest chili pepper has been defeated by a new contender:  The Dragon's Breath.

Here's the story on The Daily Post.

Little.  Orange.  Deadly.

In case you've been hit by a paralytic poison dart and can't navigate away from this page, the article tells us that a Welsh fellow named Mike Smith has created a chili cultivar that beats out the top pungency numbers for the Carolina Reaper, which has been the world record holder for spicy heat since 2013. 

Note that in the embedded video, the grower mentions that the Carolina Reaper clocks in at 1.4 million Scoville Heat Units.  But a bit of research (Wikipedia) tells me that the official Guinness World Record heat level recorded for the Reaper is actually 1,569,300.  That number's an average of the samples tested, with the top sample topping out at 2.2 million.  I probably shouldn't quibble, since the Dragon's Breath's recorded 2.48 million is actually the average of samples tested, with the top number (displayed in the photo below) being over 2.7 million.  Military grade pepper spray is supposed to be about 2 million SHU.  Ouch!

Note that the display indicates these numbers are a conversion to Scoville units, meaning these are the results of a high-performance liquid chromatography test, with the ASTA units then run through a formula to get SHU.  Science! (Photo: Ian Cooper)

The new pepper is so pungent, in fact, that Mr. Smith (if that is his real name) provides us with a warning that attempting to pop one in your mouth might actually damage your airways and could lead to death by anaphylactic shock.

This raises some interesting questions for me.

In the world of chiliheads, extreme heat is touted with much reverence and bravado.  The more natural (extract-free) heat you can wrestle from a single cultivar of pepper, the more you can charge for a sauce and the more hits you can get on your website (or blog post...hint hint).  The fervent pursuit of hot, spicy food is not generally characterized by timid restraint.

But as new hybrids and cultivars are developed every few years, each hotter than the last, are we not bound to eventually hit the absolute limit of human tolerance?  If a hot pepper can't be consumed on its own without potentially killing someone, is it still food?  The article linked above mentions that the new pepper may have medicinal applications due to its strong concentration of capsaicin.  And I imagine it could be used very sparingly to heat up hot sauces or chili powders.  But if we already can't pop one of these in our mouth, then what about the next, even hotter pepper?

And at what point do these peppers stop being food altogether?  At what point does the development of new chilies become a sporting competition to make the highest possible numbers spit out of a high performance liquid chromatograph in a hermetically sealed lab somewhere?  Or, even worse, when do they become purely a weaponized fruit, with bushels of them being strewn from the bomb bay doors of half-melted drones?

Or would a mutated strain of human arise, inured to the searing pungency of these new death-peppers, crunching them up happily by the handful and demanding more heat?  Would these Capsicoids rise up to rule over a sea of weeping, sweating, gasping humanity? 

I'm practicing for that day by drinking straight hot sauce and bowing a lot.