![]() (Tonight, when I tried to find Pico Pica here, it wasn’t easy.) 7 I bought it by default. Once, when I couldn’t take it any longer and tried to find Pico Pica here, it wasn’t easy. Its recipe is nowhere near as simple as Tabasco’s peppers-vinegar-salt, but it’s organic. Years ago my local Denver market King Soopers (a Kroger chain) began selling organic jalapeño hot sauce. ![]() 6 By buying organic we message growers that pesticides aren’t acceptable. Pesticides maim and kill agricultural workers. It actually ties in to my work with the United Farm Workers. I stopped buying Pico Pica when we began trying to buy organic exclusively. It was made in Arizona but in 1977 Pico Pica sold out to Juanita’s Foods in Wilmington, in L.A.’s harbor. And Pico Pica always was on the shelves of the markets we frequented in Los Angeles. Of course I didn’t move back to Colorado for three decades. Me in front of a Safeway supermarket in the Los Angeles area, circa 1974, in a photo taken by a community supporter. 4 Such was my penchant for picante, I was advised: “Greñudo,” addressing me by the nickname the Mexican nationals in our number had given me, 5 “we’ll have to send you back to Colorado with a case of Pico Pica.” I guess I was greñudo. in 1973 to work with the United Farm Workers’ boycott organization, the hot sauce in our households (we community organizers lived communally) was Pico Pica. 2 I think the only thing we would have had in my childhood home was a small bottle of Tabasco. And so I never tasted the varieties of piquant condiments that are household names today. I can’t tell you what it was, but it was flavorful enough that I wasn’t compelled to splash whatever table sauce was at hand. I’d order something called the Oaxacan Red. In the early ’70s we’d go to a place on Walnut called Tico’s. Believe me, you wouldn’t be able to reconcile the restaurant landscape then with what’s available today (or was, until the pandemic hit). Growing up in Boulder in the 1960s, Mexican food was considered fairly exotic. 1 At about the same time I was reintroduced to the first hot sauce I ever used on a regular basis. A week ago America’s Test Kitchen posted Our Top Rated Hot Sauce. I’ve been distracted lately by food videos sent my way by YouTube.
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