Viva la Organic Tortilla!

This post was originally published by Barbara Freiner at www.organicauthority.com
According to a recent report by Scripps Howard News Service, Mexican food is poised to become America’s favorite ethnic cuisine. Reporter Lance Gay writes that we eat four times more Mexican food than we did 20 years ago, and salsa sales are trouncing ketchup. Tortillas are replacing bread as consumers choose wraps and burritos over sandwiches. Tortilla sales, in fact, are 200% higher than they were a decade ago.

This is great news for organic food shoppers, who are finding a much wider variety of fresh chili peppers, salsas, guacamoles and tortillas at local organic and natural food stores.

Gay also notes that Mexican food has almost doubled in popularity among Americans who cook regularly (from 44% in 1985 to 86% in 2003—statistics provided by the Institute of Food Technologists). This homemade fare, which features vegetables and other fresh ingredients, is much more healthful than the cuisine enjoyed at many mainstream Mexican restaurants, whose chefs often rely on lard, entrees that overflow with cheese and the allure of huge portions.

Ironically, as more Hispanics become U.S. residents, their eating habits shift dramatically as they embrace the far-from-healthy standard American diet: frozen meals, salty snacks, junk food and other high-fat fare. They are prime candidates to embrace organic living!

Creating balance: plague control the organic way

Organic is about balance. It’s about taking advantage of what nature has to offer to keep our soil and plants healthy.

Here is an example of how we control plagues organically in our fields.

In the picture shown there’s a little brown box hanging on the plant. Inside of it there’s a small wasp. As soon as the wasp grows bigger, it gets out of the box in search of food.

Its main food is a type of larva that eats the corn and is considered one of the most dangerous plagues that attack maize fields.

Larva plague has been eradicated for many years now using this type of natural control.

Help make change this 2010!

Small changes can have a BIG IMPACT!

Join the mission and eat at least 10% organic this year!

Mission Organic 2010 is an ambitious campaign with an exciting goal: to increase the current market for organic food from 3 percent to 10 percent by 2010.

By growing U.S. organic food sales to
10 percent by 2010, you will help...

Eliminate pesticides from 98 million daily U.S. servings of drinking water.

Assure 20 million daily servings of milk that are produced without antibiotics & genetically modified growth hormones.

Assure 53 million daily servings of pesticide-free fruit and vegetables. (Enough for 10 million kids to have five daily servings.)

Eliminate use of growth hormones, genetically engineered drugs and feeds, and 2.5 million pounds of antibiotics used on livestock annually. (More than twice the amount of antibiotics used to treat human infections.)

Assure that 915 million animals are treated more humanely.

Fight climate change by capturing an additional 6.5 billion pounds of carbon in soil. (That's the equivalent of taking 2 million cars, each averaging 12,000 miles per year, off the road.)

Eliminate 2.9 billion barrels of imported oil annually. (Equal to 406,000 Olympic eight-lane competition pools.)

Restore 25,800 square miles of degraded soils to rich, highly productive cropland. (An amount of land equal to the size of West Virginia.)

Growing U.S. organic food sales to 10 percent by 2010, can improve our personal health by:

Lowering the incidence of neurodevelopmental problems in children, perhaps including ADHD and autism. Abnormal neurodevelopment in children can be caused or made worse by pre-natal and early life exposures to pesticides and chemicals that contaminate our food.

Lowering the number of pre-term deliveries each year. Prematurity is now an epidemic in the United States, affecting one in eight babies. It is a leading cause of developmental problems, and death, in babies.

Virtually eliminating dietary exposures to insecticides known to be developmental neurotoxins, based on the compelling findings reported in two University of Washington studies involving school-age children.

Reducing unwanted interference with our sex hormones, which should reduce the prevalence of erectile dysfunction, the number of people suffering from loss of sexual drive, and reduce a host of estrogen-related health problems.

JOIN THE CAMPAIGN AND LEAR MORE AT:

www.mo2010.org