It took me a long time to appreciate green peppers.
It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then I’ll get a perfect, actually really sweet red pepper from the store and when it happens, it’s magical.
oh yikes, just noticed the dates on the thread. Oh well, having gotten started I might keep going
You have awoken the Elder Gods.
Conversely, there’s also Fooled You and Notapeno, jalapeno lookalikes that have little or no heat.
Although I’ve never grown them, what about Permagreen and Staygreen? They are marketed and sold as ripe green peppers.
I can tolerate the green ones, but won’t go out of my way to eat them. On pizza they seem a bit slimy. I love all other types of peppers that I’ve eaten.
@mikecurtis – other sources describe that as ripening red (I include a couple below, one of them under the “permagreen” discussion). The purple is an intermediary color – note that even the source you quoted doesn’t say they’re purple at full maturity; it says to harvest them at the purple stage.
Purple Beauty Pepper - Seed Savers Exchange .
fruits remain purple for some time before ripening to a radiant purple-red
Interesting. Staysgreen appears to be a Stokes variety that may no longer be on the market. It’s a hybrid, so if Stokes has quit producing it it won’t be available. A couple of references I found imply that it does eventually turn color, but not for a very long time; but those references aren’t entirely clear.
Permagreen I’ve never seen; but it does seem real and it’s open pollinated, which makes it not dependent on any one producing company. – Sand Hill Preservation Society is listing it; which implies it’s probably rare, though they do list Purple Beauty (as red-ripening) which is available from several companies whose listings I get. But I’m not on a fast look seeing Permagreen from commercial sources.
https://garden.org/plants/view/131254/Bell-Pepper-Capsicum-annuum-Permagreen/
https://www.sandhillpreservation.com/pepper .
So there is a green-ripening sweet pepper – but it seems extremely unlikely that’s what you’d get if you buy sweet peppers in the store, or even the farmers’ market. ETA: thanks for increasing my knowledge base, though!
I’ve never actually seen them in the wild, so to speak. They were discussed a lot amongst backyard gardeners some time back.
Interesting. In contrast, I grew up believing I didn’t like tomato sauce. I realized this was odd, since I liked raw tomatoes and my father’s tomato soup well enough. But I avoided tomato sauce, because it tasted nasty.
Then I married a man who loves tomato sauce. So we investigated. It turns out that bell pepper is a common ingredient of tomato sauce, including my mother’s, but also many supermarket brands of “canned tomato sauce”. And I despise the flavor of cooked (or over-ripe) bell pepper.
Anyway, I think some people have food aversions because our ancestors couldn’t eat anything, they had to avoid poisonous plants and bad meat. So we are programmed to learn to avoid “bad food”. And that programming is imperfect, and sometimes is triggered by harmless foods. Many people dislike stuff that’s unlike food they ate when they were young. But I think the strong aversions are created when we get sick after eating a food (that’s how they are supposed to work) or sometimes just due to a random misfire of the system.
There isn’t really anything outdated or obsolete about this topic…
Right, our genes don’t carry enough information to give us instincts for every poisonous or edible plant-- there are just too many for that to be practical. Instead, we have instincts for learning which plants are poisonous. If you eat something and then get sick, you’ll very quickly develop a strong aversion to that food, even if it wasn’t actually the cause of the sickness (because, of course, you don’t actually know what caused the sickness). That’s nearly universal among almost all animal species. Among animals that care for their young, there’s also a strong tendency to learn from your parents what foods are good or not, because that way doesn’t even risk that one bout of sickness.
True; which is why I did keep going. However, before I noticed the date I’d quoted and specifically answered several people who I think might not be around any longer, and I didn’t bother retyping stuff.
Although I do seem to have awoken @jjimm, who was one of them –
Cause bell peppers are bitter and sour. Nasty things.