The return of Sicily's ancient 'white gold'
It's mentioned 17 times in the Bible and was harvested in the Mediterranean for more than a millennium. Now, a farmer is reviving this ancient "superfood".
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Even if you've never tasted manna, you may have heard of it. The phrase "manna from heaven" refers to a Biblical story where a food falls from the sky to nourish the Israelites as they crossed the Sinai desert. In Exodus, manna is described as a "flaky substance as fine as frost blanketed on the ground". While experts disagree what substance, specifically, this passage refers to, a honey-like, flaky and frost-coloured resin named manna has been extracted from the bark of ash trees in the Mediterranean region for more than a millennium.
In the Madonie mountains – home to the 40,000-hectare Madonie Natural Park – manna harvesting dates back to at least the 9th Century when the island was under Arab rule. During the Renaissance, Sicilian farmers used to collect this sweet sap – which tastes like cane sugar with almond undertones – and sell it to merchants from around the Mediterranean, a highly profitable trade that led the Kingdom of Naples to put taxes on it during the 16th Century.
Until World War Two, manna farming was a way of life for many Sicilian families. Footage from 1936 shows local farmers harvesting the substance, which was commonly sold to pharmaceutical companies to extract mannitol, a sugar alcohol used as a sweetener and a diuretic. In the 1950s, scientists found a way to synthesise mannitol, and in the decades that followed, manna harvesting virtually disappeared.
