Paqui, the maker of extremely spicy tortilla chips marketed as the “One Chip Challenge,” is voluntarily pulling the product from shelves after a woman said her teenage son died of complications from consuming a single chip.
The chips were sold individually, and their seasoning included two of the hottest peppers in the world: the Carolina Reaper and the Naga Viper.
Each chip was packaged in a coffin-shaped container with a skull on the front.
Lois Wolobah told NBC Boston that her 14-year-old son, Harris Wolobah, ate the chip Friday, then went to the school nurse with a stomachache. Wolobah said Harris — a sophomore at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts — passed out at home that afternoon. He was pronounced dead at the hospital later that day, she said.
Until sales of the product were suspended, Paqui’s marketing dared people to participate in the challenge by eating a chip, posting pictures of their tongues on social media after the chip turned it blue and then waiting as long as possible to relieve the burn with water or other food.
The challenge has existed in some form since 2016.
This. There’s no known mechanism by which oral capsaicin can kill someone, and millions of these chips have been sold and eaten without incident. They’ve been on the market for 7 years. You’ll notice even the article is careful to say that the chip “was implicated in” his death, or that “his mother believes the chip caused his death”, but no one will actually say the chip killed him. This is because they don’t know what happened at all. It makes sense to pull it from the shelf and I’m glad they did that while they figure out what happened, but unbeknownst to me everyone on Lemmy is a post hoc pathologist because we’re all talking like we know for sure the chip killed the kid. Sometimes life is too complicated for common sense, you know?