Cinnamon

• 1. Introduction

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  Cinnamon was imported to Egypt as early as 2000 BC, yet for centuries no one in the Mediterranean world knew where it came from. The spice traders who controlled its supply kept the source a closely guarded secret, protecting their monopoly with elaborate fictions. Ancient writers like Herodotus and Aristotle believed cinnamon grew in Arabia, guarded by winged serpents. Others insisted giant birds called "cinnamon birds" collected the sticks to build their nests. Pliny the Elder suspected these stories were invented to charge more. He was right about the deception but still wrong about the geography.

  Today, world production of cinnamon stands at 238,403 tonnes a year, led by China with 39% of the total. The word itself has traveled from an ancient Phoenician root through Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and medieval French before arriving in English in the 15th century. That long linguistic journey mirrors the spice's own passage across civilizations. What draws people back across millennia to the inner bark of a few tree species? The answers run through temple offerings, colonial wars, coumarin toxicity, and a voluntary recall tied to child lead poisoning in 2024.

• 2. Ancient Myths and Trade Secrets

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  Sappho wrote the first Greek reference to cassia in the 7th century BC, placing the spice at the edges of the known world. The ancient Egyptians used cinnamon to embalm mummies, and from the Ptolemaic Kingdom onward their aromatic compound kyphi, burned as incense, included both cinnamon and cassia. An inscription records that cinnamon and cassia were given as a gift to the temple of Apollo at Miletus, suggesting the spice carried divine as well as commercial weight.

  Pliny the Elder put a precise price on the mystery: a Roman pound (327 grams) of cinnamon cost up to 1,500 denarii, the equivalent of fifty months of labor. Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices from 301 AD set cassia at 125 denarii per pound, while an agricultural laborer earned 25 denarii per day. The Emperor Nero reportedly burned a year's worth of Rome's cinnamon supply at the funeral of his wife Poppaea Sabina in AD 65, a display of extravagance that underscored how far beyond ordinary reach the spice truly was.

  Pliny also described cinnamon arriving at the Arabian Peninsula on "rafts without rudders or sails or oars," riding the winter trade winds. The story of cinnamon birds collecting sticks for their nests persisted in Byzantium as late as 1310, a lifespan of over a thousand years for a traders' fiction.

• 3. The Long Search for the Source

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  When Sieur de Joinville traveled to Egypt with Louis IX of France on the Seventh Crusade in 1248, he reported with confidence that cinnamon was fished up in nets at the source of the Nile, somewhere near the edge of the world. Marco Polo, who had more opportunities to learn, avoided the subject with deliberate vagueness.

  The first written mention placing cinnamon in the region of India appeared in Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, written around 1180. Sri Lanka as the specific source was first identified in Zakariya al-Qazwini's work "Athar al-bilad wa-akhbar al-'ibad" around 1270, and confirmed shortly after by John of Montecorvino in a letter written around 1292. Indonesian rafts had in fact been carrying cinnamon directly from the Moluccas to East Africa for some time, and local traders then moved it north to Alexandria. Venetian traders held the European end of this monopoly.

  The disruption of that monopoly by the Mamluk sultans and the Ottoman Empire pushed European powers to look for alternative routes to Asia. During the 1500s, Ferdinand Magellan was searching for spices on behalf of Spain when he found Cinnamomum mindanaense in the Philippines, a species closely related to Sri Lankan cinnamon. That discovery set off a new era of competition.

• 4. Colonial Control of Ceylon

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  In 1638, Dutch traders established a trading post in Sri Lanka. By 1640 they had taken control of the manufacturing operations, and by 1658 they had expelled the remaining Portuguese from the island entirely. A Dutch captain's account from this period captured the sensory reality of the place: "The shores of the island are full of it, and it is the best in all the Orient. When one is downwind of the island, one can still smell cinnamon eight leagues out to sea."

  The Dutch East India Company then set about changing how cinnamon was harvested, eventually moving from wild collection to cultivated plantations. In 1767, Lord Brown of the British East India Company established the Anjarakkandy Cinnamon Estate near Anjarakkandy in the Kannur district of Kerala, India. That estate later became Asia's largest cinnamon estate. The British then seized control of Ceylon from the Dutch in 1796, completing the transfer of the spice's center of gravity from one colonial power to another.

• 5. Bark, Quills, and Species

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  Cinnamomum verum, whose Latin name translates as "true cinnamon," is native to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Despite that pedigree, most cinnamon sold internationally is not C. verum but one of four cassia species: C. cassia from China, C. loureiroi from Vietnam, C. burmanni from Indonesia, and the less common C. citriodorum from the Malabar coast.

  The differences between them are measurable and practical. Chinese cinnamon is medium to light reddish-brown, hard and woody, and 2 to 3 mm thick because all layers of bark are used. Ceylon cinnamon uses only the thin inner bark, giving it a lighter color, a finer texture, and a more aromatic but more delicate flavor that fades during cooking. Indonesian cinnamon is sold in quills made from a single thick layer, dense enough to damage a coffee grinder. Saigon and Chinese cinnamon are always sold as broken pieces because the bark is not supple enough to roll.

  Harvesting the spice involves cutting stems back to ground level after two years of growth, then waiting for roughly a dozen new shoots to form from the roots the following year. The cut stems must be processed immediately while the inner bark is still wet. Workers scrape off the outer bark, beat the branch with a hammer to loosen the inner layer, then pry it off in long rolls. Only 0.5 mm of the inner bark is actually used. The processed bark dries completely in four to six hours in a warm, well-ventilated space, after which it is cut into lengths of 5 to 10 cm for sale.

  In Japan, the harvesting follows a different path entirely: the more pungent roots are used to produce nikki, a product distinct from the bark-based cinnamon known there as shinamon.

• 6. Coumarin and Contamination

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  In 2008, the European Food Safety Authority confirmed a maximum recommended tolerable daily intake of 0.1 mg of coumarin per kilogram of body weight. Coumarin, a naturally occurring compound in cinnamon, causes liver and kidney damage at high concentrations and produces metabolic effects in people with CYP2A6 polymorphism. The European Union responded by setting a guideline of no more than 50 mg of coumarin per kilogram of dough in seasonal foods, and 15 mg per kilogram in everyday baked foods.

  The difference between species matters enormously here. C. cassia typically contains well over 1 mg of coumarin per gram of cinnamon, sometimes reaching 12 times that amount. C. verum contains only trace amounts. The problem is that mixing the two is common. One analysis found authentic Ceylon cinnamon bark containing 12 to 143 mg/kg of coumarin, while market samples reached as high as 3,462 mg/kg, a level that points clearly to cassia contamination. A 2020 analysis by ConsumerLab.com found the same issue; one supplement labeled as Ceylon cinnamon contained the highest coumarin level in the entire review.

  A more acute crisis arrived in March 2024, when the US Food and Drug Administration recommended a voluntary recall on six brands of cinnamon apple sauce. The agency had traced 500 reports of child lead poisoning across the United States to apple sauce pouches manufactured by AUSTROFOOD S.A.S., using cinnamon supplied by Negasmart, both based in Ecuador. The cinnamon had been adulterated with lead chromate. Both suppliers were placed on a Red List to prevent future adulteration.

• 7. Medicine, Research, and Limits

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  A 2023 meta-analysis of six prior meta-analyses found that cinnamon supplementation produces modest but statistically significant decreases in fasting plasma glucose and haemoglobin A1C, a marker of chronically elevated blood sugar. Older reviews from 2012 to 2019 found more mixed results: four of those reviews found lower fasting plasma glucose, only two found lower HbA1c levels, and one found no change to either measure.

  The 2012 Cochrane review noted that trial durations were limited to 4 to 16 weeks, with no studies reporting changes to quality of life, morbidity, or mortality. The Cochrane authors concluded directly: "There is insufficient evidence to support the use of cinnamon for type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus." The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health stated in 2017, citing that review: "Studies done in people don't support using cinnamon for any health condition."

  A separate meta-analysis from 2017 found that cinnamon supplementation lowered total cholesterol and triglycerides but produced no significant changes in LDL-cholesterol or HDL-cholesterol. A further review found no effect on body weight or insulin resistance. A systematic review of adverse events found gastrointestinal disorders and allergic reactions as the most frequently reported side effects. The difficulty running these studies is compounded by a persistent problem: researchers often do not specify which species or which part of the plant was used, making comparisons across studies unreliable.