Bell peppers and fiery chiltepins belong to one and the same species
A sweet bell pepper scores zero on the Scoville scale; a wild chiltepin can reach 200,000. Both are Capsicum annuum, a plant Mesoamerican farmers domesticated about 6,000 years ago. Europeans later called it pepper by mistake, assuming its spicy fruit was related to the black peppercorn vine, which it is not.
The species comes from northern South America and the southwest of North America, and remains of wild ancestors in places such as Mexico's Oaxaca Valley suggest people were eating chillies more than 8,000 years ago, before they were tamed. The genus name probably comes from the Latin for seize, a nod to the bite of the fruit, though some link it to the word for box. Even the species name misleads: annuum means yearly, yet where winters stay frost-free the plant can live for several seasons as a sizeable shrub.
Domestication usually dulls a plant's defences, but here breeders often did the opposite, selecting some lines for more heat. The usual domestication changes still came along: bigger fruit and seeds, altered growth and reproductive rhythms. Some cultivated forms have become so dependent on farming that they would struggle in the wild. Plants mostly pollinate themselves, although bees, wasps and ants mix pollen in large plantings, and commercial growers hand-pollinate to create hybrids.
Wild seed dispersal relies on birds, which eat the fruit unbothered by its heat and scatter seeds far away; the wild chiltepin now ranges from northern Peru into the southwestern United States. Cultivars differ enormously. Chiltepins carry small red berries after white flowers, while bell peppers are fleshy and four-sided and can weigh 500 grams. The ornamental Black Pearl from the US National Arboretum is grown purely for looks, and leaves on some varieties darken to purple or black with age.
Names vary by country: Australians call the sweet types capsicum, Britons divide them into sweet and chilli, and North Americans tend to name the cultivar, such as jalapeno or cayenne. The species supplies paprika, cayenne and pimenton, colours Oaxacan black mole, and provides vitamins A and C. Farmers battle whiteflies, aphids and above all the pepper weevil, whose larvae can cut yields by up to 90 per cent.
Source: Capsicum annuum
