The Chile pepper has gained enormous popularity over the past few decades. Putting the lie to popular beliefs, the Chile pepper did not originate in India but comes from South America (History 2003). There are a variety of Chile peppers. The fruit of Pepper planets are classified as vegetables but from a botanical perspective that are berries. Characteristics typically associated with fruit are used to describe peppers, including pungency, color, shape, and by their use. Broadly speaking, peppers are usually divided into two categories, hot and sweet or pungent and non-pungent. As one Chile expert maintains, ôVirtually all pepper cultivars commercially cultivated in the U.S. belong to the species C. annuum. However, one principal type, ôTabascoö, belongs to C. frutescens,ö (Pod 2003).
In the U.S. the popularity of sweet peppers like the bell pepper, pimiento, and yellow wax peppers is greater than that of the pungent varieties. The following Chile pod types are the most common peppers in both categories: New Mexican, Mirasol, Paprika, Squash, Was, Ancho, Jalapeno, Pasilla, Cayenne, Habanero, Bell, Serrano, Cherry, Pimiento, and Piquin, (Pod 2003). The anatomy of Chile peppers is the same from one pepper type to another. Chile anatomy includes the stalk or pedicle, the calyx or leafy part of the stem, the seeds which the plant uses to reproduce, the outer wall of the mature fruit or pericarp, and the reservoir where ChileÆs store their ôheatö, the capsaicin glands (Anatomy 2003 û SEE APPENDIX ONE).
The Chile pepper is speculated to have originated in Bolivia but no concrete evidence for this theory exists. Many argue that Columbus carried a plant known as aji back to the Iberian Peninsula after a voyage to South America. What the Arawak and Carib called aji we now call the ôChile pepperö, made popular around the world and giving rise to origin myths due to ColumbusÆ spread of it, ôColumbus took the pe