Each seed is capable of becoming its own plant. So 1 pepper can give you 100-150 plants. Each plant can give you 20-30 pepper in a season. That’s around 2000 seeds per plant in a season on the low end. How do people on earth go hungry when 1 plant can give 2000+ new plants.
by Adept_Blackberry2851
18 Comments
“Be fruitful and multiply, for most you bastards won’t survive”
It’s an evolutionary adaptation to competition… nothing to do with human production
Funny, I’ve been looking at my peppers the same way. I’ve even saved some seeds for when more veggie bed space opens up. But each pest can also lay hundreds or thousands of eggs and each of those eggs grow up to be hungry little buggers that will eat away at all your new plants. Or too much/little sun or rain, or snagged by some animal first before you get to it… I grow a few veggies, but if I had to rely on just my own plantings, I would have to spend a lot more hours fighting pests and weeds, more composting, and still end up with a good portion of my food being eaten by something else before I get to it.
This is a really braindead take lol. They have 150 seeds and then multiple per plant because the plant is lucky is even 1 of 2000 seeds lands somewhere it can germinate and live. Land and water and labor to force the plant to live is the valuable part not the seed. Just tossing out some bell pepper seeds absolutely cannot feed the world and it’s offensive when people say shit like this while people starve like they never thought of this
Not only that but there is nothing natural about a bell pepper, which cannot be found in nature. It was a very small mildy spicy pepper taken from South America and bred to be sweet, lack capsaicin, and grow massive in Europe by humans. The large size is completely unnatural and the plant doesn’t even serve its niche anymore, where hot peppers wanted to be picked and spread by birds who can’t taste the capsaicin. Bell peppers I can’t imagine surviving in nature in any capacity anymore
I could sow acres of vegetables with the seeds I can produce in one season.
kitchen scrap seeds will get “accidentally” chucked into vacant lands and dirt lots in the neighborhood.
Whatever plant is growing out of the Wendy’s burger tomato slice sure does love neglect.
Tell that to my struggling pepper plants! Screw global warming!!!
Well…
1) A significant % of those seeds may not be viable because you harvested it before it was ripe. A ripe bell tends to have a color change on the outside, or at least the placenta the seeds are attached to, turns a pinkish orangeish color.
2) This can’t feed the world. The primary dietary needs of the starving are protein and carbs. Vegetables with low protein and carb content can still be essential for a balanced diet, but this is only a secondary concern.
3) It takes space (land), time, water, and lack of pests to produce food. Even if all that is available, in an area where people are starving, bandits may just come along and steal it all.
4) If you wish to grow an abundance of bell peppers, sell them for profit, and send the money to needy people so they can buy their essentials, nobody is stopping you. Bell peppers are great, but not high on the list of essentials. 😉
5) In fact they are a calorie-negative food, that you will burn more calories producing a crop, than you get back when eating it. If using farm equipment, that may change but then you’re burning fuel to harvest which is technically like calories in that it is still energy, and expense that a starving region cannot afford.
In most areas where people go hungry, they need grains and meat. Try your hand at growing them and feeding livestock, and tell me if you stop shopping at a grocery store as a result. 🙂
Point is, it’s more complicated than that.
If the peppers were successful at reproducing, they’d only have a few seeds because they knew the seeds would successfully grow. So the abundance of seeds is actually an admission of weakness.
In fact, the problem is not that we do not have enough plants to feed ourselves. The problem is that there are too many of us, and there is not enough space and resources to produce food for everyone. Moreover, a part of the planet consumes far too much, leaving little for the rest. Or at least I think so; I do not know the exact numbers, so I could be wrong.
Then why didn’t any of my pepper plants survive this summer?
it depends on the viability of the seed!
It’s also a numbers game. Only a small portion of those seeds will be replanted, and an even smaller portion will germinate.
unlimited bell pepper hack
And stone fruit (drupes) only have a single seed, so I guess nature is telling me life and food should be scarce.
Natural peppers have very little to do with that fine human crafted piece of food.
They are tiny and made for birds.
Smart hard working people decided how many seeds that pepper needed not nature.
Don’t disregard the hard work of humanity to feed itself.
What is this, some kind of greater philosophy wannabe mumbo jumbo?
No matter how many seeds you have the limiting factor will still be the time, energy, land, and other resources you have available to you. Getting 2,000 seeds from one plant doesn’t mean you’ll have any more peppers the next year than if each plant gave you 10 seeds, or any fewer than if it were 100,000 seeds.