Every time I make fajitas, I cut into bell and chili peppers and notice how holl

Question

Every time I make fajitas, I cut into bell and chili peppers and notice how hollow they are. I always think to myself: what is the gas inside this pepper, and how does it get there?

Perhaps Capsicum peppers are porous. I did a little kitchen experiment to try to find out. (I'm afraid I don't know much about biology, so this "experiment" is likely to be flawed in at least one basic way, but I figured I should at least try to figure it out myself before asking.) Here's what I did:

I filled a small container with water and submerged an uncut Anaheim pepper. It was quite buoyant! I put the lid on the container so it would stay submerged. It didn't seem to become any less buoyant, and its interior didn't seem to fill up with water. No bubbles emerged from the pepper, as least as far as I could tell.

So air doesn't seem to easily pass in or out of the pepper. And of course they don't grow around air, so how does the gas get in?

Here are my guesses:

Explanation / Answer

To answer your question of what the gas is, how about the glowing splint test for oxygen! I guess it might work with a recently snuffed out match too. Cut a plug in the the pepper but leave it in place until you have the glowing match ready, then quickly open the plug and hold the match into the opening. It should relight if it is oxygen and you may hear a popping noise.

As for whether the surface tension is preventing the flow of air, you could try adding some detergent (washing up liquid or soap) to the water to break the tension and see what happens.

However, I have found an article suggesting the environment is, compared to the standard atmospheric concentration anyway, low in O2 and high in CO2 in two different pepper cultivars.

Samples withdrawn from the fruit locule over time show that CO2 ranges between 0.5% and 3% (5000

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