When you spend as much time around tree resin as we do, you start realizing something funny:

And not just here in Canada.

Long before anybody walked into a convenience store and grabbed a pack of gum, people in completely different parts of the world had already figured out that certain tree resins, latexes and pitches could be chewed.

Spruce in northern North America. Chicle in Mesoamerica. Mastic around the Mediterranean. Birch pitch in northern Europe.

Different trees. Different people. Different places.

Same basic human idea:

“Hey. I wonder what happens if I chew this?”

I love that.

The Forest Is Part of Our Family Life

That whole idea feels pretty normal in our house.

Our family has spent years bringing pieces of the forest home with us. Ron and I walk Alberta forests looking for resin. Our kids have grown up around wild plants, spruce trees, buckets of resin and whatever else we happen to be working with that week.

We homeschool our kids too, so the outdoors has ended up being part classroom, part workplace and part family life.

They can learn about trees and wild plants with us and then go inside and do regular kid stuff.

Somehow both worlds coexist just fine.

And the more I learned about chewing traditions around the worrld, the more familiar the whole thing started to feel.

People worked with what grew around them.

If you lived where sapodilla grew, you had chicle. Around Chios, there was mastic. Across northern regions, people worked with birch and conifers.

Here in Alberta, Ron and I walk through forests full of spruce and pine.

Chicle: The Gum That Helped Build the Modern Gum Industry

Chicle is a natural latex obtained from the sapodilla tree, native to Mesoamerica and the Caribbean.

Maya and Aztec peoples were chewing chicle long before the modern chewing-gum industry existed. Much later, chicle became enormously important to commercial chewing gum in North America.

That makes chicle an incredible bridge between two worlds: ancient plant use and mass-produced modern gum.

Eventually manufacturers increasingly shifted toward synthetic gum bases, but chicle remains one of the best-known examples of chewing gum that quite literally began with a tree.

Mastic: The Famous Resin of Chios

Travel across the Atlantic and another tree enters the story.

Mastic — or mastiha — is an aromatic resin associated especially with the Greek island of Chios and the shrub Pistacia lentiscus.

The resin forms hardened droplets traditionally called “tears.” Its cultivation and collection became so culturally important on Chios that the know-how of cultivating mastic was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014.

What I especially love about that story is that UNESCO describes mastic cultivation as family and community knowledge, with techniques passed from older generations to younger ones.

That part feels familiar.

Plants aren't just ingredients. Sometimes an entire body of knowledge develops around how to recognize them, collect them, prepare them and use them.

Birch Pitch: Tooth Marks From Thousands of Years Ago

Then there’s birch pitch, and this one takes the chewing story way back.

Birch pitch is made by heating birch bark. Archaeologists have found ancient pieces bearing human tooth marks, showing that people were chewing the material thousands of years ago.

A 2019 study even recovered a complete ancient human genome and oral microbiome from a piece of chewed birch pitch found in Denmark and dated to about 5,700 years ago.

Even older chewed birch-pitch finds from Sweden have been dated to roughly 9,500–9,900 years ago.

Why people chewed it isn't always certain. Researchers have suggested that chewing may have softened the pitch for use as an adhesive, while other uses have also been proposed.

But the tooth marks are there.

Someone sat there thousands of years ago and chewed it.

There’s something strangely human about that.

And Then There’s Spruce

This is the one I know with my own hands.

I can read about chicle. I can learn about mastic. I can look at archaeological birch pitch and think about somebody chewing it thousands of years ago.

But spruce is different for me.

Ron and I actually walk into the bush looking for it.

We find resin on spruce trees, collect suitable material, bring it home, sort it, process it and eventually decide which resin is going to become gum.

I’ve handled enough resin now to know that two pieces can look similar and behave completely differently.

Hard resin. Soft resin. Dark resin. Fresh resin. Resin that snaps. Resin that becomes beautifully chewy.

Spruce resin also has a documented history as a chewing material in North America. Indigenous peoples chewed spruce resin, European settlers adopted the practice, and by 1848 John B. Curtis was commercially producing State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.

So when somebody chews spruce gum today, they're participating in a chewing tradition that existed before the familiar modern stick of gum.

Four Materials, Four Very Different Kinds of “Gum”

Natural Chewing Gum Isn't a New Alternative

That's probably my favourite part of this entire story.

We sometimes talk about natural gum as though somebody recently invented it as an alternative to modern chewing gum.

Historically, it's almost the other way around.

People were chewing naturally derived materials long before modern manufactured gum existed.

What changed was our ability to industrialize the habit.

Factories brought consistency. Commercial formulations brought predictable texture and flavour. Global manufacturing made it possible to sell essentially the same chewing experience almost anywhere.

But the urge to chew something?

That's much older.

And Somehow It Came Back Into Our House

There’s something I find pretty funny about all of this.

Thousands of years of humans chewing plant materials, an enormous modern chewing-gum industry in between — and now here I am in Alberta with kids in the house chewing gum made from resin their parents brought home from the forest.

I didn’t plan that.

It just sort of happened.

We actually started making spruce gum because customers kept asking us if we could make it. Our first attempts taught us very quickly that resin doesn't always behave the way you want it to.

Eventually, something customers requested became something we make, sell and chew in our own home.

And now gum is just… around.

The kids chew it. I chew it while I'm working. Ron and I harvest the material it starts from.

Maybe that's why the history of natural gum interests me so much.

It makes something we do every day feel much less unusual.

Somewhere thousands of years ago, another family may have known exactly which local materials were worth collecting too.

Different forest.

Different century.

Same human curiosity.