Glue

Gum was not always gold. Its first use was rather modest. There is no nutritional value in gum whatsoever, but it swells in the stomach. Therefore, Bedouin and animals who came across it on the margins of the desert ate it – and still do – to still their hunger when there was nothing else. When, at the end of the dry season, the animals no longer give milk and the dates are all eaten, gum Arabic helps to live up to the ancient Bedouin ideal of abstinence and the ability to cope with hunger. In Mauritania, the Hassanya (Arabic dialect) word used for gum is ilk, from alaka, to chew.

The classical Arabic words for gum, samgh and sarab, have long been associated with poverty. The ninth-century polymath Ibn Qutayba includes samgh in a chapter about ‘the food of the poor in times of famine’. He quotes a verse by a companion of the prophet Muhammad, Hassan ibn Thabit, who wrote about a certain people in the prophet's homeland: ‘they have never been treated to maghafir (gum of a grass) or samgh or kolokwint’. Some hundred years later, this verse was explained by Abu Hanifa al-Dinawari: ‘He means: that is not their food, for they have a good life.’ Both authors cite another verse to confirm their interpretation. It is from a poem by Dhu l-Rumma, an eighth-century poet from a Bedouin family, who described a clan of coarse boors, whose ‘noses, above their beards, are like sarab.’3 Odes were Dhu l-Rumma's specialty, but this was not meant as a compliment. And Ibn Qutayba quoted some anonymous lines about a certain country that ‘lies far away from good things and from power’ where the two tastiest fares were a fungus (of a type that was also referred to as ‘Wolve's Dick’) and sarab, or talha.4 Gum was the food of the poor in their poorest condition.

In towns, however, where hunger was never that extreme, ‘gum’ had a more neutral meaning. It was just glue. Until a few decades ago, every household and office in Europe had some of the same glue–just gum dissolved in water.