Even counting their regular customers, few probably appreciate the significance of the bell pepper for trendy chain hamburger restaurant Byron. While the restaurant boasts cuts of ‘properly sourced’ British beef as the star attraction, the humble workaday bell pepper features across several hamburgers, adds substance to vegetarian meals, comes as an optional extra topping, and spices up the brand’s sauce.
In red, orange, yellow, and green, bell pepper production today is overwhelmingly dominated by the Chinese, with the Mexicans and Indonesians lagging far behind. But Byron procures its bell peppers from somewhere closer to the species’ home, a small town in northern South America which remains unspecified as the chain clings fast to its most valued secret.
True, with the town dependent on Byron as the sole purchaser of its crop, the chain is able to set an especially low price for importing the seedy foodstuff. But Byron has been confident that it gets more out of the deal than reduced costs. The townspeople work all hours of the day, all year round, to cultivate the best bell peppers that human hands can possibly feed and see prosper.
And yet all of a sudden, owing to international trade disagreements and an enticing offer from someplace else, Byron is set to cut short the contract with its South American ex-compadres. What’s more, the chain is planning to send back the last bulk order of bell peppers received, in an effort to recoup some cash as it embarks on an immediate change of business direction. But in a dirty trick all too common within the bell pepper industry, Byron will only expel the bell peppers after first extracting all the flavour.
Bound together and steamed over a low heat for many hours, the juices of the bell peppers drip and accumulate with little alteration in the colour of their flesh. Byron can use the juices in their sauce, while shipping the peppers back to South America more or less in one piece.
Of course, the South American townspeople immediately realise how the bell peppers have suffered, and in an ironic twist it is they – not the hamburger chain – who feel inclined to quote from the famous poet who previously monopolised the brand’s name, walking mournfully through their fields and slowly reciting:
Hush’d are the winds, and still the evening gloom,
Not e’en a zephyr wanders through the grove,
As Byron’s bell peppers return, to an earthy tomb,
Because their flavour is gone, and their skin flops like a glove.
