From Sacred Tradition to Pop Culture: The Unexpected History of Chia Pets

If you were alive and channel surfing in the ’80s and ’90s, you almost certainly remember the jingle: Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia! Today, some 50 years since Chia Pets first hit shelves in the United States, the funny little planters are still going strong. Available early on in a menagerie of cutesy animal shapes, including sheep, turtles, kittens, and teddy bears, the brand hit the pop culture stratosphere with that all-time catchy ditty, then branched out into licensed characters (think Bugs Bunny and Bart Simpson) in the early 2000s. And while the growing process is unchanged—soak the porous clay figurine in water, spread on a paste of seeds, and watch the sprouts cover your “pet” in fuzzy greenery—Chia Pets have since caught on with a whole new generation, thanks to retro nostalgia, time-lapse TikTok videos, and an increasingly vast and memeified catalog. Yes, you can still buy a Chia kitten, but it’s in the mix with a Chia poop emoji, a Chia rapper Ice Spice, and a complete set of Chia Golden Girls. Five decades on, the kitsch still connects. But when Marta Turok, a Mexican anthropologist specializing in folk art, looks at a Chia Pet, she sees more than a gag gift or droll decor. Her first time encountering one was at a Woolworth department store in Mexico City in the early 1990s. On the box was a clay bear with sprouted green fur that she recognized right away as a nod to a regional religious handicraft—one she had no idea had been co-opted into a novelty knickknack. “I thought it was crazy,” Turok says, “that somebody saw this as fun for kids.” As Turok knows, the much overlooked roots of the Chia Pet are anything but frivolous. In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, terra-cotta animals covered in chia sprouts are a mainstay of the elaborate Semana Santa altars found in homes and churches in the lead-up to Easter. The Holy Week altars are solemn affairs, set with candles, flowers, and other decorations that typically flank a weeping likeness of La Virgen de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows). To the faithful, the figurines are highly symbolic, says Seattle-based ceramic artist Raúl Aguilar, who is originally from Oaxaca’s neighboring state of Chiapas and has written about the tradition’s significance. The green chia shoots evoke the “continuation of life,” Aguilar says, in anticipation of Christ’s Easter Day resurrection. And the choice of animal can have meaning too: Sheep suggest the Lamb of God, while roosters call to mind the biblical story of the Apostle Peter denying Jesus before a cock crowed the dawn. Bulls, goats, dogs, deer, and even elephants are all creatures one might spot on an altar these days. To make them, artisans start with a mold and a lump of moist clay, create a hollow shell of a generic animal body, then add specific features like legs, horns, and antlers. After the figures have dried to a leathery consistency, they’re scored with a stylus (or, say, a comb or fork) to make grooves where seeds can settle and sprouts can anchor. After an initial firing in a kiln, the animals’ heads are glazed with a dark green lacquer, then fired a second time to fuse the glaze. To Aguilar, the Semana Santa pieces are a powerful example of syncretism, the blending of different religious traditions to produce something new. It’s a historical irony that the grainlike seeds of Salvia hispanica, or chia, play a central role in a Catholic custom—the Spanish once banned the plant’s cultivation because of its ties to Indigenous religion. Chia seeds were a staple for many native Mexicans, who pressed them for medicinal oil and ground them into flour for food. Aztec emperors received them by the ton as tribute from conquered lands, while warriors drank a sort of prebattle energy shake made of chia flour mixed with water and agave syrup. Chia, in fact, likely gives the state of Chiapas its name, deriving from a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, that describes a place where the plant grows. But for all that history and symbolism, Aguilar suggests, there’s still a playful side to the little animals. “They’re trying to cheer Mary up,” he says. “They’re adorable. They’re saying, ‘Don’t cry!’ ” That adorableness caught the eye of the late American marketer Joseph Pedott back in 1977, when a drugstore sales rep first showed him an imported Oaxacan chia figurine. Pedott thought he could sell them in droves, so he snatched up the rights and went to Mexico to study the production process. The company he founded, which shifted production to China in 1989, says that to date it has sold more than 32 million Chia Pets in 11 countries. This includes one to Marta Turok, at that Mexico City Woolworth more than 30 years ago. Despite the bear pictured on the box, she found a turtle inside when she opened it at home. She still has it today, although she’s never sprouted the seeds. She only bought it, Turok says, to teach her son about the unexpected ways that traditional products can transform for modern times.