Thirty years ago Ed Curry of Curry Farms set out to breed a better tasting yellow pepper. The unintended consequence of that work may sell better than the sweet flavor he produced.
Curry’s life has been spent breeding chile peppers in southeast Arizona. His work includes green and red varieties popular with growers in New Mexico. He’s closing in on a yellow pepper, shaped like the green and red varieties common with New Mexico growers, that scientists believe could be the key to unlocking cures for macular degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease.
He is working with breeders and researchers to prove his yellow chile pepper and patent the genes responsible for its high levels of lutein and zeaxanthin, two molecular components known by scientists to have positive human health impacts. While the yellow pepper already exists, none are reported to have high levels of the micronutrients Curry stumbled upon years ago.
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“This is probably our 30th season working on that one,” he said. “In the beginning I didn’t aim for a high lutein, high zeaxanthin chile. I was interested in the yellow flavors, but then it became so unique, and we kept selecting for those. What we didn’t realize is we were concentrating on those.”
A researcher from New Mexico State University working with Curry on the chile had a hunch. Tests were run on the chile peppers, and the results came back exponentially higher than those found in spinach, he said.