Yes, food that’s too spicy for a person can definitely distract from the other flavors and if way too hot even cause numbness, but it’s not actually chemically burning your taste buds. It’s just tricking one particular type of heat receptor nerve to falsely detect heat. The numbing effect can happen when those nerves are over stimulated, which triggers an inflammation response as if you had just gotten a real burn. Those nerves do get de-sensitized with exposure, but since it’s only one type among several different types of heat sensing nerve, it doesn’t damage the mouth’s ability to feel actual temperature heat. Only mammals have that particular type of sensory nerve, so birds, reptiles, etc. are completely unaffected by it.

https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/243713 started it. It’s well died off now.

Heh, you can always find shit advice on any social media.

I may have left reddit behind, but I will always carry the poop knife story with me in my heart.

This happened: https://lemmy.ml/post/1450855.

What an honour.

Edit: No tone in text, so to be clear: I’m only half joking. It’s genuinely neat that the person who started the biggest meme wave here yet commented on my post about that meme wave while doing something directly related to the topic. You’ve been a great sport about all of this.

It’s an idiom in English (in American English at least, I can’t speak for the other dialects). “Nut” can be slang for a crazy person, e.g. “That guy’s a real nut.” Other variations are “nutters” or “nut case”. A “<topic> nut” is someone who is “crazy” about that topic.