The Wild Pepperoni - FFM 2014 Day 2

The young pepperoni walks through the Amazon rainforest, its home. An herbivore, the pepperoni uses his small stature to scamper under the lush foliage to escape any predators that chase after it.

To give a more detailed description, an adult pepperoni is about 50 centimeters from tip to tail and 30 centimeters in height. It is a hairless creature with a dark orange skin tone that forages for food in the day, then burrow under low brush to hide from nocturnal predators.

“But why is it called a pepperoni?”

An excellent question, Susan! The reason these small mammals are called “pepperonis” is because their diet consists mainly of, well, peppers. Their saliva throughout the generations has developed a protein that neutralizes the capsaicin, making the plant easy pickings for them. However, there is one very peculiar thing about this relationship. While the pepperoni is unable to ingest the seeds in a pepper, the body still takes it into its system, absorbed through its intestinal walls where the seeds get pushed around between the muscles. Scientists still aren't able to figure out what caused this phenomenon, considering it to be one of the largest mysteries of biology.

You normally don’t eat these wild pepperonis, though. Instead, farmers in South America domesticated these animals hundreds of years ago, for both their ability to find peppers, as well as for their meat. Most farms for these guys are in Mexico, where farmers take the rejects from their pepper yields to feed the pepperonis. Normally, it takes a pepperoni a year to reach their full size, so the farms have them on a yearly cycle where the reproduce one season, then get harvested the next. The meat most of us recognize as pepperoni comes from their stomach and rear, where most of the pepper seeds stayed.

The normal pepperoni meat is usually very spicy as a result of these creatures eating chili peppers, so in recent years, farmers have started importing black pepper from outside sources to feed them instead, phasing out the pepperoni’s natural diet with other vegetables so that it doesn't have as many spicy seeds inside of it. This variety is by far the most popular in the market, which has caused many farms in India, where most black pepper is produced, attempting to buy their own pepperonis so that they can create a lower cost pepperoni meat to compete with the South American mark-

“James!”

…Yes mom?

“What are you telling your sister about now?”

She wanted to know where pepperoni came from, so I told her.

“You’re in college now, James. I think it’s time to stop playing these tricks on your sister.”

Fine, fine.

…Is she gone, Susan?

“Yep!”

Okay, so now we know about the wild pepperoni, but have you heard about the bolognas that live in the African Savannah?