Teething marks have been found on chewing gum made from birch bark tar ( Betula pendula ), about 6000 years old. These remains were found in 1993 by the Czech archaeologist Bengt Nordqvist in Kierikki, Finland. The Greeks also used chewing gum, in this case small balls made of mastic resin ( Pistacia lentiscus ). But the true forerunners of today’s chewing gum are the Aztecs and, perhaps, the Mayans. They obtained a vegetable gum resin from the sap of the chiclero tree ( Manilkara zapota ). It served them to join objects, but also to calm seizure and hunger if it was chewed. It also appears to have been used to occlude halitosis, like when a teenager comes home in the morning after a night out. Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan who wrote a book in the 16th century entitled General History of the Things of New Spain . In his work he said that “all women who are not married chew gum in public.” The reason for such a strange statement is that it was considered a socially unacceptable practice, despite the fact that it was a practice aimed at preventing bad breath from their mouths. And this was more the objective of the consumption of chewing gum among Mayans and Aztecs, to cover up the bad smell rather than to quench thirst and hunger.
The matter got out of hand when General Antonio López de Santa Anna offered a ton of gum to a friend Thomas Adams as a form of payment for his services. Adams wanted to use the gum to make tires, but that didn’t work out. So he decided to profit commercially from the idea for Santa Anna’s gum idea: he would develop his own commercial chewing gum which he called “chiclet.” With the help of their son Horacio, they created their chewing gum in 1871, mixing gum resin from the gum tree with a small proportion of paraffin, which resulted in a more palatable product. He joined forces with William J. White, who would be in charge of achieving flavors of the tasteless Adams gum. And until today, because the name is spread all over the world. The Adams brand is known on all continents, as well as many of its products (Halls or Trident, for example). The company grew little by little until it became Cadbury Adams. It would not be until the end of World War II when the youth began to chew gum as a symbol of rebellion.
At the beginning of the 21st century, chewing gum became so popular that the raw material became scarce. The annual production of chiclero or sapote tree resin reached 7000 tons. Let’s add that a sapote takes about 20-25 years to grow and be useful for this purpose and that it can only be used every 4 years. The accounts do not come out, the price of the product shoots up or it is simply not profitable. So alternatives were sought for its manufacture, such as the use of a neutral rubber based on polyvinyl acetate. And there is something else. To obtain the sapote resin, you have to go deep into the jungle and be exposed to the gum flies ( Lutzomyia spp .), Which attack the collectors without mercy. The problem is that with the bites they deposit protozoa of the genus Leishmania mexicana , which is finally resolved with the appearance of sores and ulcers at the site of the bite. In many cases, scars remain for life and even cause facial deformation.
“Chewing gum consumers also chewed the penalties of their collectors!”, Says Eduardo Bazo when he told this story in his book Con mucho gusto (Cálamo, 2021).
Eduardo Bazo has collected a series of stories that relate botany to food, in a rigorous and interesting book of more than 500 pages. In the chapter “A menu full of exotic flavors”, he talks about ferns. Bazo tells us that the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was already echoing in 1799 that ferns were consumed in the Canary Islands. In Humboldt’s words:
“[…] the root of Pteris aquilina serves as food for the inhabitants of La Palma and La Gomera; They scratch it into a powder and mix it with a little barley flour ”.
In the sepulchral cave of Roque Blanco (Tenerife) he did make a revolutionary discovery that shed light on it. By analyzing the intestinal content of a Guanche adolescent, the presence of pine seeds, barley flour and fern root flour could be detected. The truth is that the flour extracted from the rhizomes of ferns does not seem common to us, despite the fact that in the Iberian Peninsula Pteris aquilinia is a very abundant species. If it has been seen that its use has been frequent in various parts of the world. Eduardo Bazo says in With much gusto :
“As the works of numerous anthropologists and researchers point out, the tribes that consumed ferns suffered from a manifest shortage of food resources […] so the incorporation of these plant elements into the diet […] would make up the main dish of a emergency menu (and subsistence) with which to cope with a period of famines ”.
Today we know the reason for its lack of use: it contains ptakyloside, a toxin that causes frequent poisoning in domestic animals and even death. In addition, thiaminase causes disturbances in the absorption of vitamin B1. Don’t eat fern.
