Brief historical record of chia as American food lost in time

Chia (Salvia Hispanica L.) is an annual crop which comes from southeast Mexico and northwest Central America. The people settled in those areas have been consuming it since the pre-colonial period, being it a prevailing food in their daily diet.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in America, the Aztec empire controlled a vast area which now belongs to Mexico, with a population about eleven million inhabitants. Tenochtitlan, the capital city, with its two hundred thousand inhabitants, was situated in today´s Federal District. This amazingly advanced civilization reached its maximum splendor between 1168 and 1521, when it was destroyed by the conquerors led by Hernán Cortés.

By that time Central America had at least twenty botanical species which they used for different purposes. Four of them stood out from the nutritional point of view: amaranth, beans, chia and corn. These were the main components of their daily diet. Their importance is well grounded in the historical Florentine Codex written between 1548 and 1585 by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, under the title Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (General history of matters from Nueva España). The twelve-volume work written in Nahuatl and Spanish is in the Laurentian Library, in Florence, Italy. Some aspects related with production, commercialization and uses of chia are described in several passages of this huge work.

The chia seed, according to scientific evidence, was first used in human feeding about 3,500 years before Christ. Between 2600 and 2000 B.C. it was grown in the Mexico Valley by the Teotihuacan and Toltec civilizations before the arrival of the Aztec people, and was used as currency in central Mexico. The whole seed was used in daily meals, mixed with other food and emulsified with water as a fresh drink; ground to become flour as part of medicines; pressed to obtain oil, later used as the basis for cosmetics for the face as well as for the body. During the war it was essential due to its energetic nature; it was used to pay the yearly taxes which the Aztecs demanded from conquered people, and was offered to their gods in religious ceremonies.

The Spanish conquest repressed the natives, suppressed their traditions and destroyed most of the intensive agricultural production, such as the existing commercialization. Many of the crops which kept a preponderant place in the pre-colonial American diets were banned for being so closely related to religion, and also perhaps because of their difficulty to adapt to the European weather conditions, and were replaced by other foreign crops (wheat, barley, etc.), for which there was a great demand. Of the four main crops corn and beans were the exception and are nowadays two of the most important crops all over the world.

Chia cultivation decreased after the discovery of America. Nowadays, in its home place, the species is grown only in a few acres, and there is very little chance that the sown area may increase due to political and social factors. However, owing to its outstanding characteristics, it has started to be regularly grown in several countries.

Modern science has concluded that pre-colonial diets were by far better than those nowadays consumed in the same area, and chia, which survived only in small plots in steep mountain areas from the south of Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua, comes back five hundred years later to become again a protagonist of human nutrition.

Its chemical composition and nutritious value as a source of omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and dietary fiber, confers it a great potential to be a part of the food and industrial markets.

A simple botanical description of the chia plant and seed

Chia, Salvia Hispanica L., is an annual plant belonging to the mint family. It is between one and one and a half metre tall, and its stems branch out in a quadrangular section with white, short pubescences. The opposing leaves, with serrated edges, are eighty to one hundred mm. long and forty to sixty mm. wide. Its flowers, bright blue or white, grow in terminal spikes. The seeds are oval, smooth, shiny, and are between one and a half and two mm. long. Depending on the variety, the color can be white or grayish black with irregular spots of a dark reddish color. The pollination is entomophilous, that is, performed by insects such as bees, wasps, etc.

The available information shows that none of the omega-3 levels of common products obtained from animals fed on chia-enriched diets could be reached with flax-based diets as well as fish oil or algae-based, without heavily affecting the profitable yield of the animals and one or more of the intrinsic characteristics of the final product. In all cases, the hindering factor for the usage of large percentages of the available sources of omega-3, with the exception of chia, is the taste, smell and/ or typical texture transmitted. As to flax, animal production will also be affected when the production parameters are reduced.

Eng. Ricardo Ayerza (j.), Associate in Arid Lands, Office of Arid Lands Studies, The University of Arizona, 250 E: Valencia Rd. , Tucson, AZ85706-6800, USA.1