The archive began at a dive bar in wine country. The menu was a single sheet of paper, black and white, typed in an ordinary font and laminated. The first item on it was chili.
The bowl was good enough to return for, night after night. Later, scoring places to live and work, one measure kept coming up: how likely a good bowl of chili was nearby. We called it the probability of chili, and it is still here as a calculator.
Then we went looking for the authority on chili and found there isn’t one. There are three organizations that trace themselves to one cook-off in a Texas ghost town. There are people who will tell you beans are a crime, and people in Cincinnati who put it on spaghetti with a mountain of cheese. There’s a 1967 contest where, depending on who’s telling it, a judge claimed he’d been poisoned.
This site is the record we wanted to find. We are outsiders, documenting with care. We don’t pick winners between organizations, regions or pots. Every fact links to where it came from, and when the sources disagree, we show you all of them.
Chili Gets Me Out of Bed is No. 1 in Gets Me Out of Bed, an encyclopedia of things worth waking up for, and a project of Room 527. Corrections, records and testimony: chili@room527.com.