James F. Scheer - The Magic of Chia: Revival of an Ancient Wonder Food

For my wife Joan Davidson-Scheer:
All of my love is gift-wrapped for you.

Jim

O NE OF THE BEST-KEPT SECRETS IN NUTRITION IS THE SEED OF a desert plant called chia, among the most nourishing, energy-giving, endurance-sustaining food products ever discovered. There are good reasons why it is such a secret, as will be explained later.

Toward the end of the twelfth century, long before the New World got in the way of an India-bound explorer named Christopher Columbus, chia seed was already an important food there.

Cherished by a succession of Aztec emperors, chia was second only to corn and beans in importance as a food crop, with amaranth rated after chia. It was eaten as a seed, ground into flour, used as a medicine and pressed into oil.

Royal planters of Aztec emperors grew precious chia seeds in floating gardens surrounding their capital city of Tenochitlan. The Aztecs created the novel idea of growing flowers, decorative plants, chia, and other foods on numerous soil-covered rafts floating on a shallow lake. Eventually, these rafts became small islands rooted to the lake bottom.

Initially products from the floating gardens and the rich soil in the emperors extensive and well-guarded land holdings were his exclusive property.

Legends tell us that all Aztec classesnobility, healers, the military and merchants, and crop growers, reluctant to accept the royal monopoly on chia, smuggled chia plants out of the royal domain. Over the centuries they were cultivated throughout the Aztec empire.

Soon chia seed became a staple food in the marketplace. The emperors subjects paid their annual tribute to him, a form of taxes, with chia seed. In time, chia seed became legal tender.

As archaeologists have discovered, chia seed was buried in the graves of Aztec and Mayan emperors, just as favorite foods were placed in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Chia seeds were so important to the Aztecs that they served as an offering to their deity Chicome Coatl.

In the early 1500s Hernando Cortez, leading the Spanish conquerors, subjugated the proud Aztecs, under Emperor Montezuma, with a combination of diplomacy, deceit, cunning and superior weapons.

Impressed with the energy, endurance, and vitality derived from eating chia seeds, Cortez sent chia plants back to Spain, where they were neither appreciated nor cultivated.

Chia seed actually became a part of the Aztecs language, as revealed in the twelve-volume Florentine Codex, written by Father Bernardino de Sahagun between 1558 and 1569. After mentioning that some types of chia seed were golden brown and speckled, Fr. Sahagun wrote that a common butterfly was characterized by the Aztecan term chian papoloti. The butterfly is painted as if sprinkled with chia, flecked everywhere on its body, and its wings are painted, painted with the chia design.

According to the Florentine Codex, the Aztecs made dough called tzaoll in the likeness of the goddess Chicome Coatl in the courtyard of her pyramid. To her they offered all varieties of maize, all varieties of beans, and all varieties of chia. This was because she was the maker and giver of all those things which are necessaries of life, that people may live.

Fr. Sahaguns account of chias use as a food is colorful and quaint:

Everyone knows how atole is made. (Not I, father!) Then he writes that parched maize kernels are mixed with chia seed, a savory food. Ground raw, a littlehalf the length of the little fingeris mixed with opossum tail and water. If this is drunk by the woman about to give birth, she will promptly deliver her child.

Fr. Sahagun writes that the gelatinous chia seedwithout opossum tailis drunk during fasting and clears the chest. Also, it is like atole when mixed with grains of maize or with toasted tortillas.

When the oil is pressed or squeezed out of chia seed, painters apply it and beautify their work. It can be used like a varnish to make picture frames or furniture glossy, he writes.4

Perhaps the most widespread and best known variety of chia is Salvia hispanica, an annual plant with a four-sided, almost square stem, bearing oval leaves. Blue flowers sprout from long spikes at the end of the branches. Four seeds rest in the base of the plants calyx, a green outer whorl. Another common and prolific chia grows in areas with deep, sandy clay soils: the Columbariae.

Thanks to the Aztecs love of chia, other neighboring Indian cultures throughout Mexico and in what is now the southwestern United States began harvesting and eating chia, which grows wild and abundantly in sandy and desert soil under 4,000 feet altitude.

Thanks also to the Aztecs, Mayas, Tehuantapecs and Native Americans, we owe the information that chia seed is one of natures few near-complete foods.

Use of chia seed by Native Americans helped point the way for two southern CaliforniansBob Andersen, of Valley Center, and Hal Neiman, of Santa Monicato spend nearly twenty years cultivating the most health-beneficial forms of chia seed and growing them in vast amounts so that, for the first time, there is enough chia seed to meet the mounting worldwide demand.

This book is a salute to Andersen and Neiman for their vision, faith, diligence, patience, persistence, and heavy investment of money in cultivating chia from the wild state to domesticity!

T HOMAS J EFFERSON HAD IN MIND A PERSON SUCH AS B OB Andersen when he wrote, No service can be rendered to a country that is more valuable than to introduce a new plant to the culture.