辣椒的用处（用英语写）

Chili peppers (genus Capsicum) can be eaten fresh or dried, raw or cooked, alone or mixed with other foods. They add zest to any food—meat, poultry, seafood, starch, vegetable, fruit—whether eaten by themselves or as an ingredient in a prepared dish. Peppers are the most popular spice and condiment in the world. They are consumed daily by one-quarter of the world's population, and the rate of consumption is growing. Nonpungent or sweet peppers are also consumed as a vegetable, but are the less popular spice. All capsicums were pungent before being domesticated by prehistoric New World peoples and before the breeding of non-pungent (sweet) types. Peppers, both pungent and non-pungent, are the fruit of perennial shrubs that were unknown outside the tropical and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere before 1493, when Christopher Columbus returned from the first of his voyages in search of a western route to the East Indies. Although he did not reach those exotic spice lands