Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Peppers
If you wanted to pick out a single starting point for the produce revolution, there is no
shortage of candidates: tomatoes, fresh herbs, baby lettuces. But what about peppers? Chile
peppers, certainly, but bell peppers even more so. Thirty years ago bell peppers came in one
color - green.
But then a funny thing happened: consumers were offered a choice. And they responded.
Between 1960 and 1990 American per capita consumption of bell peppers quadrupled. Ac-
cording to the USDA, on any given day almost a quarter of Americans will eat a bell pepper
or a dish containing bell peppers. That's nearly double the percentage of those who will eat
a French fry and almost the same percentage as those who will eat a tomato.
This increase happened with chile peppers as well, though on a smaller scale. And oddly
enough, after an initial rush of growth, chile pepper production and consumption leveled
off in the 1990s, while bell peppers just kept on growing.
How did this come about? Once again, credit that most unlikely of all agricultural
powers, the Dutch, who figured a way to outsmart nature. All peppers start out green; it is
only as they mature that they begin to show their true colors. Technically what happens is
not unlike that which causes the turning of the leaves in New England. Green chlorophyll is
a dominant pigment and tends to overshadow everything else. But as fruits begin to mature
and develop sugar, that sweetness alters their chemical makeup. The chlorophyll starts to
break apart, which allows the underlying col ors to reveal themselves. This happens easily
in nature, but it takes some doing in agriculture. Peppers are tender and prey to all sorts
of bugs and viruses. It takes extraordinarily careful farming to grow peppers to full matur-
ity out-of-doors without their suffering some sort of damage, even if it is just cosmetic. In
Holland farmers were consistently able to grow their peppers to full maturity inside green-
houses, meaning that they could offer peppers in a rainbow of colors. Red came first, then
yellow, then orange, purple and even something called chocolate (mostly marketing poetry;
really more of a bruised green).
Those color changes are merely symptomatic of a deeper transformation: what had been
a pretty one-dimensional "green" flavor becomes sweeter and more complex. To chem-
ists it's the breakdown of the one-note 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine. This is a particularly
