What’s behind the stereotype that Minnesotans don’t like spicy food?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

When a customer asks if the taquitos are spicy at the El Burrito Mercado stand at the Minnesota State Fair, the servers always have the same response.

They ring a bell and scream in unison, “It’s not spicy!” The routine itself backs up the conventional wisdom that many Minnesotans just can’t handle the heat.

Danny Rubio, a Chicago transplant of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage who now lives in Empire, started to wonder about this stereotype after a few meals out.

Then in a YouTube interview with Vice President Kamala Harris this summer, Gov. Tim Walz joked about his preference for “white guy tacos” — proclaiming black pepper to be the top of the spice level in Minnesota.

It validated all of Rubio’s suspicions.

To unpack the idea that Minnesotans don’t eat spice, Rubio submitted his question to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, at the State Fair.

“It’s not to be judgmental. But it’s what I’ve experienced, eating out in certain restaurants,” he said.

The story of how Minnesota developed its food culture is multilayered — the result of geography, immigration patterns and the myths we tell about ourselves.

The North Star State is becoming increasingly diverse. Still, non-Hispanic white Minnesotans comprised 80% of the state’s population as of the last census.

Classic Minnesota cuisine evokes dishes like Tater Tot venison hot dish and wild rice soup — the culinary heritage of the Scandinavians and Germans that settled the state in the 1800s, blended with Indigenous ingredients.

Regional differences in taste aren’t there from birth. Newborn humans are hardwired to crave the sweetish, fatty flavor of mother’s milk, said Job Ubbink, head of the Food Science and Nutrition Department at the University of Minnesota.

But as people age, differences in taste have long been determined by climate, trade and cultural exchange, according to Ubbink.

The food of northern Europe was originally heavily centered on animal protein, potatoes and other vegetables that could be grown in cold, damp places. Chili peppers were not among them.

Indigenous cultures of the Great Lakes and Northern Plains also lacked spice in their food for the same reasons, said Lee Garman, executive chef at Owamni. The premise of the award-winning restaurant in Minneapolis is that it features only pre-colonial ingredients. Were it not for the flavors of southern Indigenous cultures, the menu would be far more limited.

“We use chilies for absolutely everything because that’s where so much flavor comes from,” Garman said about the menu. “We don’t have any butter or dairy or anything like that, so you lose that fatty flavor. So we just end up using a lot of dried chilies from Mexico.”

Scandinavians have historically eaten less spicy food than most other cultures, said Erin Swenson-Klatt, food and handcraft programs coordinator at the American Swedish Institute. When northern Europeans arrived in Minnesota in the late 19th century, the strongest flavors they had came from smoking, salting and fermenting.

Spices associated with Scandinavian baking like cinnamon, cardamom and saffron would have been too expensive for anything but holidays. Chilies were basically unheard of.

In contrast, modern Scandinavians are big travelers, globally connected and multicultural, said Swenson-Klatt. They harbor a love of Southeast Asian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foods, as well as a more recent obsession with tacos.

Ironically, some Americans of Scandinavian descent living in Minnesota’s small towns have held on tightly to some culinary traditions that Scandinavians themselves have largely forgotten. Take Swedish potato sausage, for example, a popular Minnesotan Christmas food with very simple, warm spicing.

“Swedes have no idea what it is,” Swenson-Klatt said. “They’re like, ‘That’s so weird that you eat that. Wow. That’s like a really, really old-fashioned thing from one part of Sweden.’

“We have actually had Swedish food experts come here to study old techniques and recipes because they have survived longer here than they did in Sweden,” she said.

As people expand their gastronomic horizons, new experiences beget acquired tastes. Beer and coffee are universally popular despite their bitterness. One inebriates and the other stimulates. But what does capsaicin, the active component of chili peppers, bring to the table?

Exposure to spicy foods can cause a little pain, a gradual numbing of the taste buds, heightening of one’s heat tolerance and — critically — excitement and pleasure, according to Ubbink.

“As omnivores, we try all kinds of things to see if they can serve as a food. We try very carefully to make sure it doesn’t kill us. But then we have that innate desire as a species, as mankind, to explore things,” he said.

Ubbink interprets the governor’s joke about the way Minnesotans eat as emphasizing an in-group identity. Minnesotans are heavily descended from self-effacing Scandinavians with an intolerance to spicy peppers. It’s telling a narrative (which could resonate politically) about Minnesota as a place with a distinct culture.

“But where do we start to change these patterns? Over time, it’s very often younger generations who start to engage, to experiment,” Ubbink said. “It gets very slowly ingrained in the local culture.”

The concept of “Minnesotan” food has been shifting since before Walz first moved here 30 years ago.

When Lee Svitak Dean, the Minnesota Star Tribune’s now-retired Taste editor, started at the paper in 1980, some recipes involved a journey. She would drive around to little ethnic grocery stores in search of ingredients now stocked in the spice aisle of Cub Foods: garam masala, sumac, Szechuan peppercorns.

A greater number of Southeast Asian families began to settle in Minnesota at the end of the Vietnam War. Chinese restaurant chains were expanding their empires in the Midwest, inventing fusion staples like Leeann Chin’s cream cheese wonton. The Strib printed the phonetic spelling of the Greek gyro so readers could pronounce this novel word.

Svitak Dean grew up eating salt and pepper meat and potatoes. But she’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone she knows whose tastes haven’t evolved in the intervening decades. Even her 93-year-old mother is weak for spicy Thai drunken noodles, a marked departure from the mac and cheese she used to make from scratch for the kids.

The job of a food writer enabled Svitak Dean to explore vast culinary frontiers, and today she loves dishes that are packed with flavor. Nevertheless, when she thinks of the ultimate comfort food, it’s the mashed potatoes of her childhood.

“I like things to be generally not bland. But you know, there are certain things that are good that way,” she said. “I love mashed potatoes because I grew up on that ... even though at the end of the day, it’s a pretty bland food.”

One’s emotional connection to food only leaves so much to choice. While every individual is a food explorer of varying courage, Ubbink said, people do not tend to change their core foods: the things they associate with an ordinary meal.

Chef Yia Vang of Minneapolis’ Union Hmong Kitchen and Vinai plans to discuss that idea in a forthcoming book. His theory is that if you ask anybody what they’d want for their last meal on Earth, chances are they’ll describe a dish attached to a memory of feeling safe, warm and taken care of.

For him, that was a homemade sausage with a spicy little dip that his parents gave him when he was home sick from school. The spice burned at first, but he has sought that tongue-tingling feeling ever since.

When Hmong kids are young, he said, they don’t think critically about how complex flavors act together — like how heat breaks up the fatty sweetness of coconut milk in a curry. They just know they need a bit more pepper sauce in there.

Vang also cooks at the State Fair, where prospective customers sometimes turn away when they learn his food is spicy — even if the sauce is on the side.

“Food is a universal language we use to communicate with each other,” Vang said.

“When you go, ‘I don’t do that, I don’t like spicy food,’ what you’re really saying, is that regardless of what language you use to try to communicate with me, I don’t want to speak to you,” he said.

It never ceases to disappoint him when people don’t even want to try.

If you’d like to submit a Curious Minnesota question, fill out the form below:

Read more Curious Minnesota stories:

Why is a casserole called hot dish in Minnesota?

For the love of Prince, why won’t anyone in Minnesota take the last piece of food?

Why do Minnesotans have accents?

Why did Scandinavian immigrants choose Minnesota?

How did egg coffee become a Minnesota tradition?

Why did Spam become an international sensation?