Peppers: History and Exploitation of a Serendipitous New Crop Discovery

W. Hardy Eshbaugh

Few could have imagined the impact of Columbus' discovery of a spice so pungent that it rivaled the better known black pepper from the East Indies. Nonetheless, some 500 years later, on the quincentennial anniversary of the discovery of the New World, chili peppers (Capsicum) have come to dominate the world hot spice trade and are grown everywhere in the tropics as well as in many temperate regions of the globe. Not only have hot peppers come to command the world's spice trade but a genetic recessive non-pungent form has become an important "green" vegetable crop on a global scale especially in temperate regions.

The New World genus Capsicum is a member of the Solanaceae, a large tropical family. Various authors ascribe some 25 species to the genus but this is only an estimate with anticipated new species to be discovered and named as exploration of the New World tropics expands. Exploration and plant collecting throughout the New World have given us a general but false impression of speciation in the genus. Humans unconsciously selected several taxa and in moving them toward domestication selected for the same morphological shapes, size, and colors in at least three distinct species. Without the advantage of genetic insight these early collectors and taxonomists named these many size, shape, and color forms as distinct taxa giving us a plethora of plant names that have only recently been sorted out reducing a long list of synonymy to four domesticated species. The early explorations in Latin America were designed to sample the flora of a particular region. Thus, any collection of Capsicum was a matter of chance and usually yielded a very limited sample of peppers from that area. Only with the advent of collecting trips designed to investigate a particular taxon did the range of variation within a species begin to be understood. One needs only to borrow specimens from the international network of herbaria to appreciate what a limited sample exists for most taxa, particularly for collections made prior to 1950. The domesticate Capsicum pubescens, for example, that is widespread in the mid-elevation Andes from Colombia to Bolivia, is barely represented in the herbarium collections of the world. Most herbarium collections of Capsicum, with the exception of Capsicum annuum holdings, are woefully inadequate. Furthermore, besides Capsicum annuum, very little attention has been paid to the many cultivars of each of the domesticated species. Often material is unusable because it was collected only in fruit neglecting the most important and critical characters associated with floral anatomy and morphology. With the advent of germplasm collecting programs during the past three decades, and concomitant improvement in herbarium collections we have come to better understand the nature of variation in the genus Capsicum. The increasing number of Capsicum herbarium specimens permits renewed interest and debate on the proper species classification.

A great deal of additional information is available.  This is simply the introduction to the article.  Read further and you can learn about the following topics:

• TAXONOMY
• CAPSICUM PUBESCENS
• CAPSICUM BACCATUM VAR. PENDULUM
• CAPSICUM ANNUUM VAR. ANNUUM--CAPSICUM CHINENSE
• ORIGIN
• EXPLOITATION
• GERMPLASM
• REFERENCES
• Table 1

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