By Jena Aldredge

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".

It's a hot and muggy summer day in Sicily's Madonie mountains, a rugged range of ridges about 65km east of Palermo. In a field of ash trees, the buzzing of cicadas is interrupted by a voice. "You came at the right time," says Giulio Gelardi, a local farmer pointing towards a white-streaked branch. "This is the famous manna."

Along the bark of each tree are thick lines of manna, a white mineral-rich resin referenced in the Bible 17 times that has been used as a natural sweetener and medicinal aid for centuries. Manna harvesting (the practice of cutting the bark of Fraxinus ornus trees to collect their sap), used to be a common practice throughout the Mediterranean. But in the past 80 years, urbanisation and industrialisation have led to it nearly vanishing.

For the past 30 years, Gelardi has made it his mission to put this Biblical superfood back on our tables, and today, this once-forgotten sap is being used by chefs and pastry makers in innovative ways.

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.

When Gelardi came back to his hometown of Pollina in 1985 after 15 years away, he realised that one of the core components of his local culture was vanishing. "When I was growing up, everyone knew how to extract manna," he explains. "When I came back, there were less than 100 farmers who could still do it."

Pollina is a 3,000-person medieval town that seems sculpted out of the surrounding limestone hills. As a child, Gelardi learned to harvest manna in the summer from his parents. "Manna harvesting involved the whole family," he explains. Men used handmade billhooks to make thin cuts along the bark, women collected the overflowing sap using dried prickly pear stems and children turned the goopy nectar into cylindrical cones called cannoli, due to their resemblance to the popular Sicilian sweet.

According to Gelardi, the hardest part of manna harvesting is knowing when to cut the bark. Ash trees produce sap year-round but only produce enough resin to harvest during the hottest days of the year. Gelardi says if you cut the bark too early, it can cause the trees to stop making manna altogether. "Finding out when the moment for cutting has come is a unique skill based on observation and intuition," he says, explaining: "[It's necessary to] listen to each plant."

For example, leaves turning from dark green to lighter green with yellow marks may mean that a tree has reached peak manna production. Spotting cracks in the ground near the roots can also mean it's ready for harvest, as plants produce surplus sap to overcome dry spells. When the tree looks ready, manna farmers make a shallow cut in the bark and observe the plant's reaction. If a plant is mature enough, a small amount of resin will ooze from the cut. Farmers can then proceed to make deeper carvings, as small streams of sticky manna will flow towards the roots.

"Manna harvesting is not something you can learn from a book," Gelardi explains. "If we don't pass these skills down to the next generation, we would lose centuries-old local farming knowledge."

A few months after returning to Pollina, Gelardi set out to revive the waning tradition. At first, most locals did not meet his "manna renaissance" with enthusiasm. "My friends thought I was crazy. They said manna was a thing of the past," he says. Undeterred, Gelardi spent months learning all he could about it.

He spent time with elder farmers to refine his harvesting skills and visited Palermo's public library to study manna. "I knew manna was used locally as a sweetener, a moisturiser and a diuretic," he says. "But I learned that it could also be used to treat food intoxication, a variety of skin conditions, arthritis and cold symptoms."

Gelardi also started to realise how manna shaped local geography and culture. For example, Gibilmanna, a nearby hill home to a famous sanctuary, owes its name to the Arab words "gibil" (mountain) and "manna". Local expressions are also shaped by manna, like the local phrase, "vivere di mieli e manna" ("to live of honey and manna"), meaning living an affluent life.

In 1986 Gelardi began handing out pamphlets containing facts about manna to tourists staying at a nearby resort. "People were captivated by manna's healing properties and its impact on local culture," he recalls. By the 1990s, he was leading tours demonstrating how to harvest manna to international travellers. "They started to see it as our local superfood," he says.

Manna is mostly composed of mannitol, a naturally sweet crystal compound, as well as minerals like potassium, magnesium and calcium. According to Vivienne Spadaro, a professor of botany at the University of Palermo, this thick white resin can be used as a dietary supplement to reintegrate minerals, especially potassium, and as a base for several medicines. "Manna has been used to treat constipation, cough, sore-throats and skin wounds due to its decongestant and soothing properties," she says. And because of its low glycemic index, Spadaro says some manna can be used as a sweetener for diabetic people or those on hypo-caloric diets.

While leading manna tours, Gelardi developed a more efficient way to harvest the substance with far less risk of contamination from bark or insects. He created a "clean manna" technique by attaching a small aluminum spout to the tree so that manna flows away from the trunk along a fishing line attached to the spout. This allowed Gelardi to nearly double his manna production.

In the following years, Gelardi started selling his manna to bakers and pastry chefs, who incorporated it into everything from cannoli, wafers, flakes and chocolates. He also sold manna to pharmacies to make laxatives, minerals supplements and skin products. In recent years French skincare companies Biotherm and Yves Roche have used it to make skin moisturisers.

In 2002, manna from the Madonie was declared a protected ingredient by Slow Food, an international organisation that promotes endangered food traditions. By the mid-2000s, manna became a sought-after ingredient for local chefs and pastry-makers.

"I started using manna to make pandolce (fruitcake) with manna and almonds, but then realised it goes well with savoury dishes, too," says Giuseppe Zingales, chef at Hostaria Cycas in the nearby medieval village of Castelbuono. The restaurant offers many manna-infused dishes, including manna-crusted pork tenderloin; risotto with asparagus, bacon and manna; and wild thistle flan with manna fondue. At another Castelbuono eatery, Ristorante Nangalarruni, chefs Peppe Carollo and his daughter Francesca use crushed manna to create one of the restaurant's signature dishes: suckling pig with almonds, pistachio and manna crust.

"The key is to [use] it well," Francesca Carollo explains, "A small portion of sweet-tasting manna offers a nice contrast to roast meat flavour, but too much manna can make this dish too sweet."

Pastry chefs are particularly interested in manna. Nicola Fiasconaro, one of Italy's most famous patissiers, now produces a special edition of panettone, Italy's traditional Christmas fruitcake, made with chocolate and frosted manna, while Michelin-starred chef Davide Oldani featured chocolate-covered manna sticks as part of the menu of his Milan-area restaurant D'O from 2014 to 2016. In recent years, the Madonie's "white gold", as it is sometimes called, has reached a price of €200 per kg and has been used to make a variety of sugar-free baked goods, from muffins to biscotti.

Most chefs buy manna from the Madonie's Manna Consortium, a cooperative created in 2015 by Gelardi and other farmers to market manna products and promote manna harvesting to younger farmers.

"I grew up hearing about manna but had never learned how to harvest it," says Mario Cicero, who belongs to the Consortium. Born in Castelbuono, he spent years working around the world as a chef before returning to the Madonie. As part of his training, Cicero spent months with older farmers, including Gelardi. "Giulio's taught me many tricks," he says, "but he mostly passed on a contagious passion for manna harvesting." Cicero now tends 200 ash trees in his farm near Castelbuono and hopes that more young people will take up manna harvesting.

Seeing young farmers like Cicero becoming ntaccaluori (Sicilian for "cutters") is what Gelardi is most proud about. As he explains: "Every young person that learns how to harvest manna will ensure the survival of a centuries-old tradition."

By Richard Thompson

Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks.

Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than $100m a year. And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC. "It is schmaltzy pastiches of Disney-style woodland scenes, complete with cutesy animals and fairy tale cottages. They are… like the images you find on cheap greetings cards – sugary and forgettable." And compared to some critics, Mullins is being polite.

These critics don't just consider Kinkade's paintings to be nauseatingly sickly, they detect something disturbing and ominous about them. In her 2003 book on California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion summed up his art by saying. "It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." As harsh as that sounds, Didion may have been more perceptive than she realised. Art for Everybody, a new documentary directed by Miranda Yousef, shows that the man who called himself the "Painter of Light" did indeed have a dark side. "His branding was so effective that you didn't know there was this really complicated and I would say tortured artist behind it all," Yousef tells the BBC. "He lived a Greek tragedy of a life."

The documentary features audio tapes recorded by Kinkade when he was a long-haired, bohemian-looking art student in California in the 1970s – and even then, he was already fretting over the question of whether he could make an impact as an artist while making a decent living. After a stint in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated feature film, Fire and Ice, he concentrated on idealised, nostalgic American landscapes, and he and his wife Nanette sold reproductions of them outside a local grocer's shop. In the 1990s, he took the idealism and the nostalgia to new heights, and swapped his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes that a Hobbit might deem a bit on the twee side. Old-fashioned lampposts and cottage windows glowed. Streams twinkled beneath slender stone footbridges. Bushes burst with pastel flowers. And cash registers rang. Kinkade didn't sell the paintings themselves, but the hazy idylls they depicted were soon being printed on collectible plates advertised in newspapers and magazines. For many Americans, they were comforting refuges from the modern world.

In Art for Everybody, Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, is contemptuous of Kinkade's imagery. "It's a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea," he says. "The colour is juiced and the light coming from inside those cottages is intense and blaring." Just as importantly, as far as his critics were concerned, Kinkade's pictures had nothing to them beyond their superficial decorative qualities. "They are banal and hollow, with no intent to say anything meaningful," says Mullins. "Today we would think they had been produced by AI – designed as if by algorithm to a certain formula." But Yousef insists that Kinkade's skill can't be discounted. "There were actually other people who were painting cottages and Christmas scenes and putting them on plates and all that stuff," she notes, "and the thing is that Kinkade's were so much better. His works just blew everybody else's out of the water."

She also believes that Kinkade's paintings, rather than being wholly market-led, were linked to his childhood in Placerville, California, where he was raised by his single mother and only intermittently saw his violent father. "It's a common criticism that his cottages look like they're on fire on the inside. And then you learn that it was because when he was growing up it was always cold and dark in the house when he got home, because they didn't have the money to keep the heat and the lights on. He was painting the thing that he wanted."

Kinkade's deprived upbringing, says Yousef, didn't just inspire his choice of subject matter, but drove him to make as much money as he could. He and his business partners printed pictures on an industrial scale, as well as putting his immediately recognisable imagery on furniture and ornaments, and selling them on the QVC shopping network. They also set up hundreds of faux olde worlde Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries in shopping malls around the US, and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand. Again, Yousef doesn't see Kinkade as entirely calculating. Having grown up in a house with no pictures on the walls, "He sincerely believed that art should be accessible to everyone."

Behind the fantasy

Whatever you thought of the paintings, the mass-marketing of the work of a single artist was certainly groundbreaking. In interviews at the time, Kinkade asserted that he was no different from an author selling stacks of novels or a musician selling CDs. He even declared that by industrialising his output, he was doing what Andy Warhol had always dreamt of. But Mullins argues that Kinkade was being "obfuscatory and disingenuous" by churning out reproductions by the thousand, paying his assistants to add a few dabs of paint here and there, and then selling these prints for thousands of dollars, as if they were rare and precious works of art. "Prints offer an affordable way of buying art by great artists," she says. "They retain their value through the limited nature of the edition. This was never Kinkade's strategy."

Still, this sort of disagreement between Kinkade and his critics was one of his selling points. Art for Everybody features news reports and promotional videos, in which he tells adoring audiences that his art could be understood and appreciated by everyone, whereas only the snooty elite could see anything artistic about Chris Ofili putting elephant dung on his canvases, or Tracey Emin presenting her unmade bed to gallery-goers. "This is not legitimate art," he proclaimed. As much a televangelist as a painter, Kinkade was a born-again Christian who assured his devotees that buying his work put them on the right side of a political and spiritual line separating them from decadent metropolitan tastemakers. He trademarked the sobriquet "Painter of Light", not just because of all the sunlit clouds and fiery cottages in his pictures, but to signify that he was a force for virtue and Christianity. "The art world is a world of darkness today," he thundered. He, in contrast, was "someone who stands up for family and God and country and beauty". A doughy, plaid shirt-wearing fellow with a thick moustache, he often appeared on television with his blonde wife and his four blonde daughters: the embodiment of wholesome, traditional, all-American values. His fans weren't just paying for his pictures; they were paying to associate themselves with this proudly conservative persona.

But that persona, like the pictures themselves, was more a fantasy that Kinkade wished for than an accurate representation of reality. He was prone to swearing after the directors of his mawkishvideos called "cut". He relied on alcohol to cope with work pressures. And, in the documentary, his daughters say that they were encouraged to smile in videos and personal appearances, but often felt as if their father cared more about his career than about them. "Thomas Kinkade and his persona and his brand really cast an extraordinarily long, dark shadow over his entire family," says Yousef, "and there was a lot wrapped up in perpetuating the brand and preserving it."