🫑 The Great Green Pepper 🫑

I'm green. Big deal, right?

Wrong.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about being a green bell pepper: everyone thinks you're boring. I sit here in my bin at the grocery store, watching people walk right past me. They reach for my neighbors instead—the red peppers, the yellow ones. Those guys get picked up, examined, placed gently in shopping carts like they're made of gold.

Me? I get looked at and put back down.

"Let's get the red ones," a mom says to her daughter. "They're sweeter."

She's not wrong. Red peppers ARE sweeter. They've had more time to develop sugars. But here's a secret most people don't know: those red peppers used to be green! That's right. If I stayed on my plant long enough, I'd turn red too. Or yellow. Or orange. We're all the same pepper, just at different ages.

I'm basically a teenager in pepper years.

The mist sprayer hisses above me, and tiny droplets settle on my glossy skin. I watch a man squeeze a yellow pepper like he's testing a stress ball. "These are better for digestion," he tells his friend.

Actually, we're all bell peppers, so we all measure zero on the Scoville scale. That's how scientists measure spiciness. Zero means no heat at all. We're the mild-mannered Clark Kents of the pepper family. But sure, pick the yellow one. See if I care.

A little girl reaches toward me. My heart—if I had one—would be racing. Her fingers get closer, closer...

Then she switches to a red pepper.

"Pretty!" she squeals.

I slump in my bin. Well, I would slump if I could move.

This is when I start to wonder: Should I have stayed on the plant longer? Let myself ripen into something more popular? Sure, I'd lose my crisp texture and my fresh, bitter bite—that's the chlorophyll in my green skin talking. But at least I'd get chosen.

The fluorescent lights hum overhead. A cart squeaks by. I think about my ancestors.

Did you know peppers come from the Americas? Ancient Aztecs and Mayans grew us thousands of years ago. Then Christopher Columbus discovered us—well, he didn't discover us. We were already there. But he brought us to Europe, and we spread all over the world. My great-great-great-great-great grandpepper probably never imagined ending up in a grocery store in Ohio.

Or being rejected by a five-year-old.

Here's another fun fact: I'm not even a vegetable. I'm technically a fruit. A berry, actually. The word "pepper" comes from the Sanskrit word for berry. So when people say "eat your vegetables," and they point at me, they're scientifically wrong.

Not that it matters when you're sitting here unpicked.

A red pepper next to me gets scooped up by a teenager. "Mom wants these for the fajitas!" he yells down the aisle.

I could be in those fajitas. I'm EXCELLENT in fajitas. My crisp texture holds up to heat. My sharp, vegetal flavor cuts through all that cheese and sour cream. But nobody thinks about that. They just see green and think "boring."

Maybe that's my problem. I need better marketing. Red peppers have THREE TIMES the Vitamin A I have. Yellow peppers are loaded with Vitamin C. What do I have? Vitamin K? Nobody even knows what that does!

(It helps your blood clot. You're welcome.)

The afternoon stretches on. Shoppers come and go. The mist sprayer hisses every twenty minutes like clockwork. I'm starting to accept my fate: the discount bin, then the compost heap.

But then I see her.

A woman in a chef's coat walks up to our bin. She has flour on her sleeve and decisive hands. She doesn't even glance at the red and yellow peppers.

She reaches straight for me.

"Excuse me," says a nearby shopper. "Don't you want a red one? They're sweeter."

The chef smiles. "Not for what I'm making. I need the bitter notes of a green pepper. The way it stands up to high heat without getting mushy. You can't make a proper Chinese pepper steak with anything but a green bell."

She turns me over in her hand, examining my firm sides, my glossy skin.

"Perfect," she says.

And just like that, I'm in her cart.

From my new vantage point, I can see the whole produce section. There are purple peppers in a specialty bin. White ones too. Chocolate-colored ones that look like they're from another planet. Each one is special in its own way.

Even green ones like me.

Here's what I learned sitting in that bin: Being picked isn't about being better. It's about being right for the job. Those red peppers? Great for roasting. Yellow peppers? Beautiful in salads. But when you need a pepper that won't fall apart, that adds a sharp, fresh bite, that brings complexity instead of sweetness?

You need a green pepper.

You need me.

So yeah, I'm green. And you know what?

Big deal.

✨ THE END ✨