Chia Power

Warning: Don't Read The Magic of Chia Seed

This article, published on the Raw Living website by William Anderson over 20 years ago, gets a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, It's full of errors and misinformation.

 

Easter Week Chia

In parts of Mexico and Central America, chia appears in traditional Easter Week celebrations. 
In 2024 Viernes de Dolores, the Friday of Sorrows, falls on March 22, marking the beginning of Easter Week, or Holy Week. The day commemorates the seven sorrows of the mother of Christ. Temporary altars and displays are set up in the streets, usually featuring an image or statue of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores surrounded by flowers, and a variety of traditional items: candles, oranges, bowls of colored water, corn seedlings, and chia sprouts. According to this article, the chia seeds are blessed at the beginning of Lent.

Sprouted sage seeds blessed on February 2, have also long been associated with the celebration of Our Lady of Sorrows. Growing greens remind the viewer of the resurrection and renewal of life. These sprouting sage seeds are also known as chia, the seeds traditionally sprouted in the grooves of clay animals, figures and pots.

Ron Mader of Planeta has documented this use of chia pets in Oaxaca.

My friend, Rachel Lindsay, a Fulbright Fellow in Nicaragua, sent me this photograph of chia seedlings used in the famous huge street sawdust paintings in León:

Viernes de Dolores

In Oaxaca markets, vendors are busy planting chia pets to display on sidewalk altars during the Friday before Easter week.

Eew. Just Eew.

Be careful in consuming whole chia seeds.

A 39-year-old North Carolina man swallowed a spoonful of whole chia seeds, followed by a glass of water.

For two weeks he was unable to swallow anything else, because the chia had gotten stuck at the base of his esophagus and hydrated there into a hard dry ball of chia gel. He needed an endoscopy. His doctor performed one and removed the ball of seeds with difficulty. While inside of him, she took a snapshot with a little endoscopic camera.  View this photo if you dare. Eew.

“It got to be this sort of almost Play-Doh-like consistency, very hard in terms of a liquid but also sort of soft,” says Dr. Rebecca Rawl, MD, the gastroenterology fellow at Carolinas HealthCare System who helped treat the patient. As reported by @MandyOaklander at TIME.com.

Back in 2014, the "Chia Seed Challenge" was an experiment popular among pre-teens like these. The consequences aren't good and could potentially be even more serious than what happens at 3:27, below. Eew. Don't watch.

 

Chia Crunch Cookies

Recipe is here.

Please take my poll

Chia Seeds Described in a Scholarly Article from 1882

Download the original article as a pdf

Bulletin de la Societe Botanique de France, 1882, Book 29. Pg 138-139.
Chia seeds, by M. Hiland Flowers (the American Journal of Pharmacy, May 1882).

(Translated from the French) These are the seeds of Salvia hispanica which, despite the name, is from America, as is common knowledge.  It grows in the northern regions of Mexico.  The oil extracted from this seed is even better than flax oil for certain industrial uses. 
It is also used in preparing a refreshing beverage.  To one glass of cold water, add a spoonful of seeds and a bit of orange blossom water. This beverage is an emollient and a soothing agent in any illness accompanied by fever. The gelatinous substance that the seeds produce is used for the same pharmaceutical purposes for which we use flax seeds.  For the aforementioned reasons, and for that of trying to lower its price (now 60 cents per pound), people are starting to cultivate it in the United States, specifically in Pennsylvania.

Footnote: This sage is probably not the only seed in America whose seeds produce a gelatinous substance and which are used for medicinal or nutritional purposes.  Dr. Edward Palmer, who is responsible for important recent botanical explorations of the northern regions of Mexico and the western states of the American Union, wrote a paper on plants used by the Native Americans.  He established that the chia of Mexico, of New Mexico and of Arizona is produced by  Salvia columbariae Benth.  Mr. A. Gray, in his Botany of California, vol. 1, p 599, holds the same opinion, as does Mr. Rothrock in his Report Upon United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian, vol. 6, p 48.   Rothrock’s book explains that prospectors in California made good use of the seeds called chia, which are those of  Salvia columbariae.   Large quantities were found in graves dating from several centuries back (see Bankroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States, vol.2 pp. 232, 280, 347, 360).  It appears that the Aztecs grew chia regularly, much as the Egyptians grew flax, the containers of which are found in their graves.  The Nahuatl name for this plant is actually "chia", or more correctly "chianzotzotl".  Thus was it described under the name of Salvia chian by La Llave. 

In France Guibourt classified the seeds in question under the name of Salvia hispanica L. (see his Natural History of Simple Drugs, 4th ed. 11, p. 432  and his Observations on the Products of Mexico, published in 1866).  He even had the plant cultivated in the gardens at the School of Pharmacy where, unfortunately, it did not take.  The Pharmacopoea Mexicana which appeared in the town of Puebla, Mexico in 1832 also speaks of Salvia hispanica.  Let us add to the information provided in the same issue of the American Journal of Pharmacy by Mr. John M Maisch, that the best proof of chia’s origin is that there are 3 distinct varieties (Fray Bernardino de Sahugun, General History of Things from “New Spain,” p. 537 and 624).  These difficulties present a promising thesis subject for a young pharmacist.

MY COMMENTS: Primary sources are writings such as scholarly articles, research papers, correspondence, maps, and photographs.  This historic article, which was published in the Journal of the Botanical Society of France, is an excellent primary source.

The main paragraph summarizes some uses of chia that were common in 1882. The footnote, however, is a muddle, at best. It describes the confusion about which species of chia is  used. 

Apparently some "young pharmacist" did come along and sort out "these difficulties" because we now know that Salvia hispanica was used throughout Mexico and that Salvia columbariae was used by native Americans in the United States. (But remember that when this article was written there were only 38 states! )

Anyway, I've been collecting primary sources addressing the uses of chia seeds, and I'll add some of them here from time to time. I hope you find them interesting.

Note: Credit for this translation goes to my very talented friend Caroline in Madison.

I am presently seeking someone who can help me translate papers from the Spanish. Please email me for more info.

Book Review

(republished from Plant Science Bulletin 25(2) 2006)

Chia: Rediscovering a Forgotten Crop of the Aztecs. Ayerza, Ricardo and Wayne Coates. 2005. ISBN 0-8165-2488-2 (Paper US$14.95) 216 pp The University of Arizona Press, 355 S. Euclid, Ste. 103, Tucson , AZ 85719 .

Chia by Ricardo Ayerrza Jr. and Wayne Coates arrives from the University of Arizona Press intended to provide a wide range of information on a lost crop of ancient America, Salvia hispanica. Chia is a paperback, illustrated by a few black and white images but largely reliant on the text and textual figures to make its case. In this it succeeds, admirably raising chia seeds in the reader's consciousness far above the one place most BSA members might have encountered it, in a 3AM infomercial selling Chia Pets.

Chia was a crop of the great civilizations of North and South America , including the Maya and the Inca, though it was most prominently cultivated by the Aztecs. It has a number of remarkable properties made use of by those ancient cultures and which have potential for agricultural improvement today. Not least among the properties of chia is possession of abundant mucilage, making the seeds very sticky, either for making statues (ancient religious practice) or those Chia Pets though the oil from its seeds has much greater relevance.

Chia opens with a discussion of agriculture and food shortages around the world, especially among the native peoples of the Americas. Credit is given to Norman Borlag's Green Revolution and to the tremendous advances it made possible in food production. However, problems with the modern Western diet are also highlighted, one of which, the nature of consumed fats, consumption of chia might ameliorate. Chia is especially rich in the omega-3 fatty acids which are important aids to health and which are consumed in flax- and fish-based health supplements. In fact chia is even richer in these oils than flax. Chia oil is also very valuable for making oil paints as it provides extraordinary longevity to the colors used.

The chia crop is considered from an historical perspective, both its use in the Aztec Empire as a staple crop and a means by which conquered peoples paid tribute and its decline with the coming of the Spanish. The authors make the point that chia fell much more deeply into disuse than other Aztec staples such as amaranth due in part to certain pagan religious associations of chia. Along the way, the authors are relatively even-handed, not falling into politically correct stereotypes of Christanity's entry to the Americas, and they even point out the loss of some parts of Aztec heritage due to destruction of codices by the Aztecs themselves under a king who predated the Spanish arrival. One other possible reason for the disuse of chia is the fact that unlike many other Aztec crops, it could not be successfully added to European agriculture. This is because chia is a short day plant which flowers too late for agronomic production in Europe .

Chia comes as the crop for which it is named is experiencing a renaissance, both in its original homes as well as in the US . Though the book chapters could be better ordered, as the presently jump from topic to topic in their present order, and more illustrations, perhaps in color, would make a significant improvement. Chia is an excellent book which belongs in college and university libraries, as well as the libraries of those interested in nutraceuticals or just simply in using this heart-healthy crop.

-Douglas Darnowski, Department of Biology, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN 47150.

Clean Eating

Tiffany of the Gracious Pantry has a wonderful food blog that I'm going to start following!

She's got lots of recipes containing chia seeds including this interesting approach to making strawberry-chia seed jam!