There have been postings circulating on social media claiming that it is possible to know the “gender” of a sweet pepper based on the number of bumps at the bottom, and that ‘female’ peppers are sweeter than male peppers. This statement is false. Parts of the flower from which a pepper comes are male or female, but the pepper is not one, and the number of lobes and sweetness depends on variety, growing conditions and ripeness.
‘Turn the peppers around to check their gender. Those with 4 bumps are females and those with three bumps are male. The female peppers are full of seeds, but sweeter and better to eat raw and the males are better to cook, ”say the reports (here, here, here).
Botanist James Wong unleashed this myth here in the Guardian in 2018. Just like this article presented by Oregon State University here and this one from the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Ohio State University here. The pepper plant grows flowers that have both male and female reproductive parts. The peppers are the fruit of these flowers – literally the ripened ovaries – and contain the seeds that are the product of sexual reproduction in the flower. The fruit was not slaughtered.
The process can be seen here in this video.
Allen Van Deynze, director of the Seed Biotechnology Center and co-director of the Plant Breeding Center at the University of California (here, here) told Reuters in an email that the allegation is a ‘myth’. He explained: “Pepper flowers are called hermaphrodite, with both female and male parts in the same flower. The fruit itself is derived from the female ovary (like all fruits), but has a combination of male and female parents (DNA) in their sade. “
The number of buds is related to the variety, genetics and growing conditions, and sweetness usually depends on how ripe the pepper is, which means that a red pepper will be sweeter than a green pepper.
Other garden and pepper sites also settled the claim. Some note that peppers with four lobes may have more seeds as they have more room to grow, but there is no guaranteed correlation (here, here, here, here).
This claim has been circulating for several years and was previously unleashed by other fact checkers, including Snopes in 2015 (here) and PolitiFact (here) and AFP (here) in 2019.
VERDICT
Untrue. Peppers have no sexes. The number of lobes and sweetness depends on the variety, genetics, growing conditions and ripeness.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.