[elfcard]

That's amusing, because I looked at the thermometer, and thought, oh that's good, I can use that. But a chilli pepper, do we really need a character for a chilli pepper? So to answer your question, unicode is trying to bridge the gap in communication that offers a language independent set of recognizable glyphs that can be used to communicate. And one mans chilli pepper is another mans thermometer.

[yoz-y]

I suppose that the chilli pepper is there for restaurant menus which often use it as an indicator of spiciness.