🌶️ Red or green is the same plant

Run down New Mexico’s list of official state symbols — bird, flower, tree, cookie, aroma — and you reach an entry most people have never seen on such a list: State Question. The New Mexico Secretary of State keeps the record of how it got there: “In 1996 the New Mexico State Legislature passed a House Joint Memorial declaring ‘Red or Green?’ as the official state question. This refers to the question always asked whether one prefers red or green chile when ordering New Mexican cuisine. This measure was passed to signify the importance that the chile industry has on the economy of the state.” A legislature sat down, looked at a pepper, and voted it a place beside the state bird.

Basis: New Mexico Secretary of State, “State Question” (About New Mexico → State Symbols): “In 1996 the New Mexico State Legislature passed a House Joint Memorial declaring ‘Red or Green?’ as the official state question. This refers to the question always asked whether one prefers red or green chile when ordering New Mexican cuisine. This measure was passed to signify the importance that the chile industry has on the economy of the state.” The list of symbols alongside it — State Aroma, State Cookie, State Question and the rest — is that office’s own index.

So: red or green? Here is the part that stops people. It is the same plant. Not two crops, not two species — one field, picked at two different moments. New Mexico State University’s Extension guide for chile growers gives both timings in a row: “The early green crop will be ready for harvest about 120 days after planting. The red crop will take about 165 days.” Forty-five days is the entire difference. Green chile is taken at what growers call the mature green stage, which NMSU says the fruit “normally reaches … 35 to 50 days after the plants flower,” and red chile is simply the same pod left alone to finish: “Red chile is usually harvested in the red, ripe, partially dried stage.” Every red pod in one of those New Mexico fields was a green one that nobody picked.

Basis: New Mexico State University Extension, Guide H-230, “Growing Chiles in New Mexico” (revised by Stephanie Walker, Danise Coon and Israel Joukhadar): “The early green crop will be ready for harvest about 120 days after planting. The red crop will take about 165 days.”; “Fruit normally reaches the mature green stage 35 to 50 days after the plants flower.”; “Red chile is usually harvested in the red, ripe, partially dried stage, and is further dehydrated at the processor before being packaged as dried whole pods, flakes, or powder.”

Those forty-five days have a consequence. Where the warm season runs out before day 165, the red half of the question gets hard to reach — and NMSU writes the escape hatch into the same sentence: “Areas with a shorter growing season may have little or no red chiles for harvest unless an early-maturing cultivar is planted.” Look at that unless: a plant breeder can shorten the wait, so this is a limit growers work around, not a wall. Still, the two answers to the state question are not only two flavours; they are also two different quantities of summer. The work is different too. The same guide records that New Mexican-type green chile “is mostly harvested by hand,” with machines only now catching up, while red chile and paprika are largely machine-picked — so the green answer and the red answer are also two different kinds of day for the people in the field.

Basis: New Mexico State University Extension, Guide H-230, “Growing Chiles in New Mexico”: “Areas with a shorter growing season may have little or no red chiles for harvest unless an early-maturing cultivar is planted.”; “New Mexican-type green chile is mostly harvested by hand, however great strides are being made to mechanize the crop.”; the same Harvesting section reports that jalapeños, red chile and paprika are largely machine-harvested.

The chile New Mexicans argue about did not turn up by accident either. Chile peppers, NMSU writes, “have been grown in New Mexico for at least four centuries” — but the modern crop has something close to a birthday: “The development and release of ‘New Mexico No. 9’ in 1913 by Dr. Fabian Garcia standardized New Mexico-type chile peppers and provided a foundation for the New Mexico chile processing industry, with approximately 8,000 to 10,000 acres harvested annually.” Look hard at the word standardized. Before 1913 a chile was whatever the seed in somebody’s hand happened to be, varying from field to field and family to family. Garcia’s work at what is now New Mexico State University turned that into something a cannery could plan a year around — and a crop you can plan around is a crop that can become an industry, and then a state question.

Basis: New Mexico State University Extension, Guide H-230, “Growing Chiles in New Mexico”: “Chile peppers (Capsicum annuum) have been grown in New Mexico for at least four centuries.”; “The development and release of ‘New Mexico No. 9’ in 1913 by Dr. Fabian Garcia standardized New Mexico-type chile peppers and provided a foundation for the New Mexico chile processing industry, with approximately 8,000 to 10,000 acres harvested annually.” The reading of the word standardized is this page’s, not the guide’s.

The state guards the name, too, with an actual law. The New Mexico Department of Agriculture describes the New Mexico Chile Advertising Act as “a state statute that makes it unlawful to advertise, label or sell chile peppers or products as New Mexico … chile unless the chile peppers or products were grown in New Mexico” — and the protection reaches down past the state’s own name to any “city, town, county, village, pueblo, mountain, river or other geographic feature located in New Mexico,” so a jar cannot borrow a New Mexican place name it has not earned. The Act even writes down what a chile pepper legally is: it is defined there as “the fruit from Capsicum annuum.” Somewhere in a filing cabinet, in careful legal language, there is a definition of a pepper.

Basis: New Mexico Department of Agriculture, “All Things New Mexico Chile”: “The Act is a state statute that makes it unlawful to advertise, label or sell chile peppers or products as New Mexico (or city, town, county, village, pueblo, mountain, river or other geographic feature located in New Mexico) chile unless the chile peppers or products were grown in New Mexico.”; “‘Chile pepper’ is defined in the Act as ‘the fruit from Capsicum annuum.’”