So once again, I’m at my local Safeway, cursing the radical pricing discrepancy of Bell Peppers…
Green Bell: 3 for a dollar
Red Bell: $1.99 each
Orange & Yellow Bell: $1.99/lb (yikes!)
Why? Are Green varieties the only kind that grow in bulk? Are they easier to grow? Why are the others over twice as expensive? A pepper is a pepper to a farmer or greenhouse, right?
I think the green ones are bitter and nasty, and love the red/orange/yellow varities.
My tin-foil-conspiracy-sensor thinks that this is just an artificially created scarcity to gouge customers.
Aren’t the yellow and red varieties ripened forms of the green ones? My guess would be that they’re more fragile and harder to ship when more ripe plus they take more time on the plant, reducing efficiency.
Since bell peppers are so light, isn’t $1.99 a pound less expensive that $1.99 each?
Bell pepper trivia:
In Japan, a bell pepper is called a piimon (peemone). An insult is to call someone a piimon implying they have an empty head.
They may ship in different crates, but red peppers and yellow peppers start life as standard green bell peppers. Any green bell pepper left on the vine long enough will ripen to red or yellow (or purple or orange), and a green bell pepper is simply an immature red or yellow pepper. You can try this at home: buy pepper seeds and start them indoors or pepper plants in the spring. You’ll see that you have a perfectly edible and normal green pepper on the plant that, if you leave it unpicked, will in time turn red and sweet.
Thus the growing time is longer, and the shelf life is shorter. A red or yellow pepper is that much closer to rotting. Other than that, I don’t think it’s especially more fragile than a green pepper. But both the longer growing time and the shorter shelf life make it a more costly product to grow and stock, hence the higher price. Plus, of course, they are much sweeter and more delicious, so they probably charge more because they can.
Orange and yellow tend to be more expensive than red because they are less common varieties than the red, at least here in New Jersey. Most that I’ve seen have been imported.
That doesn’t make sense. Red/yellow peppers must be harder to grow or ship, else producers would have switched to producing the variety that is more in demand.
Reading this thread, the thing that stikes me most is people have been posting different reasons for there being different colours. obviously some people are wrong, but we do not have a clear answer yet because people are posting when they are not 100% sure.
I am 100% sure that so-called green peppers are unripe bell peppers; ripe bell peppers might be red, yellow, orange, or purple, depending on their variety.
Hmm, I did this in the garden last year. The plant store sold seeds of specific color varieties.
Green Bell seeds: Grew nice green pepper, when left on the vine turned a blackish purple and rotted without ever turning into a red or yellow.
Red Bell seeds: Grew nice and green, then changed directly to red in a couple of weeks.
Yellow Bell seeds: Grew nice and green, then changed directly to yellow in a week or two.
Also, as far as shelf lifetime, the reds and yellows from the store last just as long in my crisper drawer as the grenn ones do.
I AM 100% sure, having grown peppers and had them ripen to red, while my father picks the same peppers and has them green. Although I’m not much of a gardener, my dad is a highly experienced one, and I’ve spent a lot of time in seed catalogs with him (and eating the results). I can’t address the issue of anything but Bell peppers, but those, I assure you, are green when immature and various colors according to the variety (but usually red around here) when immature.
I must say I agree with you, reds do seem to last just as well as greens, and greens do not turn red before they rot. It may be that greens are more popular so more are grown.
But don’t you see the problem? You bought green bell pepper seeds. Odds are, it was a hybrid form of pepper that was desinged (by man) to never fully ripen, and thus, stay green. As you also noticed, both your red and yellow peppers started off as green.
Now, if you are a large scale pepper maker, what makes more sense, buy two different types of seeds, amke sure to keep all of them spereated, and then pick each one at the same time, or buy one lot of seeds, pick half of them when green and let them sprout more fruit, and then pick the other half when fully ripe? It’s easier, because only one set of seeds and plants to deal with, and, since they are made to be green before ripening, you can get more sets of green peperse in the same time it takes to get one set of red or yellow.
If green peppers left on the plant will turn to red, then I’ve another reason that green ones are cheaper. This is certainly true in the case of my hot peppers.
When you pick peppers from a plant (I’m a hot pepper junkie, I’ve a 20ft row in my garden) the energy of the plant is sent into other immature peppers, and into fruiting additional peppers.
When you leave them on the plant to get red, you get less yield per plant.
