the.com/bell pepper
A fruit that spent millions of years evolving capsaicin, then quit.
means The sweet, mild member of the pepper family — crunchy, bell-shaped, and the only one in its genus that never learned to bite back.
from From 'bell' (describing its hollow, bell-like shape, flared at the base and dented at the top) plus 'pepper' — itself a hand-me-down from Latin 'piper,' originally used for the unrelated spice from the East Indies. Early explorers slapped the familiar word 'pepper' onto these New World capsicum fruits because of the sting their wild relatives carried, even though botanically they share no lineage with true peppercorns. The bell pepper, a cultivated, capsaicin-free variety of that same capsicum family, simply inherited a name built for a burn it doesn't deliver.
- botanical status
- technically a fruit, legally a vegetable
- color truth
- green ones are just unripe red ones
- heat level
- zero scoville, the only pepper that chickened out
- vitamin c
- beats an orange, gram for gram