Short answers, pulled from the story.
Carl Linnaeus gave the pea its scientific name, Pisum sativum, in 1753. The Latin name means cultivated pea. Some sources now treat it as Lathyrus oleraceus, though the need for this change is disputed.
The word pea is the result of a back-formation from the older English noun pease, which came from the Latin pisum and ultimately from the Greek pison. Speakers assumed pease was a plural because it ended in s, then created pea as a new singular by dropping that final s.
Mendel grew and examined about 28,000 pea plants, cross-breeding pairs of contrasting traits such as tall and dwarf plants, green and yellow peas, and smooth and wrinkled seeds. He found that first-generation offspring showed only the dominant trait, while second-generation offspring showed a roughly 3-to-1 ratio of dominant to recessive traits. His work established that traits are inherited separately from each parent and was published in an obscure Austrian journal before being rediscovered around 1900.
Field peas have been cultivated for at least 7,000 years. Seeds showing domesticated characteristics from that period have been found at archaeological sites around present-day Turkey, and the earliest archaeological finds of peas anywhere date to around 10,000 BC in the Near East and Central Asia.
Green peas were introduced from Genoa to the court of Louis XIV in January 1660. A hamper of them was presented before the King and shelled by the Savoyan comte de Soissons. They remained a luxurious delicacy, and by 1696 Mme de Maintenon and Mme de Sevigne each described them as "a fashion, a fury."
World production of green peas reached 21.5 million tonnes in 2023. China and India combined accounted for 86 percent of that total.