FIGHT BACK : SCIENTISTS TAKE BITE OUT OF JALAPENO.

Byline: David Horowitz 

Texans love their chili peppers, and not just for the fire and flavor they give to Tex-Mex cuisine. Peppers, and in particular the jalapeno pepper, have become an important factor in the Lone Star State's economy. Americans shoppers now buy $660 million worth of Mexican-style salsa every year, and most of it comes from Texas.

What's made salsa so popular is the fact that shoppers can have their pepper sauce just how they like it - hot, medium or mild. Usually, the milder the sauce, the more bell pepper and the less jalapeno it contains. And, while bell peppers have a nice flavor of their own, they don't taste like chilies. So, the challenge to the salsa industry was to find a pepper with the flavor of a jalapeno without the fire.

Last year, scientists at Texas A&M announced they'd developed a milder jalapeno, one that contains less capsaicin, the natural chemical that gives peppers their burn. More recently, the San Antonio-based company that makes Pace Picante Sauce said it had patented its own variety of heatless jalapeno.

The company's somewhat melodramatic press release reads like the book jacket of a spy novel. They called it Operation Big Chill! At a secret laboratory in Hawaii and hothouses in South Texas, Pace's genetic engineers toiled for five years to create a jalapeno pepper for the 21st century.

What they ended up with, according to the company, was a pepper about twice the size of the traditional jalapeno with the same flavor - but almost none of the kick. Pace is already using its new pepper in place of bell peppers in its extra mild and picante sauces.

The real story, of course, is not that Pace has a new salsa but how important genetic engineering and research have become to the American food industry - and how rapidly. In 1987, there were just five species of genetically altered plants under development. Today, nearly 2,300 such plant varieties are being tested in fields all over the United States.

In one lab, they're working on a new type of potato that absorbs less oil during frying, thereby reducing the fat content of french fries and potato chips. In another, scientists are developing strains that resist the kind of blight that wiped out the Irish potato crop in the 1840s and ravaged potato crops in this country last year.

When you talk about such huge cash crops as potatoes and cotton and corn, even a modest improvement in the plant's yield or its resistance to disease and insects can mean billions of dollars to growers. Genetic engineering allows scientists to achieve these changes in a fraction of the time that conventional cross-breeding takes.

What's the rush? Look at the world's population projections for the next century - with billions of new mouths to feed. Look at what's happening right now in Texas and Oklahoma. Drought-resistant crops might save the farmers there if they could be developed in time.

MEMO: David Horowitz's column appears on Saturdays.