@jacklandismusic

1 month ago

The resin of most conifers (yew is a BIG exclusion) is actually super useful in all those ways, and more! It works to cover wounds and protect the tree from infection, which it can also do for us! Pine tar is also used in baseball to add grip to a bat, since it’s so sticky.

Spruce resin can also be rendered down to make spruce gum, a very early form of chewing gum. As resin ages, it hardens (over thousands of years, that’s how you get amber). The hardened resin of most conifers is chewable, but spruce resin specifically is commonly made because spruces produce a lot of resin, and they’re fairly common trees in alpine regions. Once the Native American/First Nations tradition of chewing spruce gum caught on with white settlers, it became a pretty big industry, especially in Canada and mountainous regions of the US. Folks would go out with chisels and hammers and little crates on their hips to harvest spruce tar in the winters (cold hardens it, heat softens it). They’d sell this raw resin to candy and pharmaceutical companies who would process it by heating it to a liquid point, and straining it through a sieve to remove any dirt or bark particles. The liquid resin would then be poured out and molded into little lozenges as it cooled (a lot like those old-timey hard candies you see folks making on TikTok). These were then sold as chewing gum, sometimes in a medicinal context and sometimes in a novelty/candy context.

You can actually make spruce gum at home if you have an oven and/or a stove, and a sieve and a pot that you wouldn’t mind sacrificing (hardened spruce gum is tough to get off). It’s a really fun thing to try!

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