Everyday Things: Chewing gum

The act of chewing gum is enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people worldwide yet what is it about chewing gum that is so satisfying? Psychologists would have us believe that it is all linked to our infant years; from sucking milk from the breast, to sucking your thumb as an infant, to chewing on a blade of grass as a small child; chewing gum is a natural progression in mastication.

There is evidence that gum chewing stretches back at least 9000 years from the early Mesolithic period. Excavations from waterlogged bogs in Germany and Scandinavia have uncovered black lumps of tar with well-defined human tooth impressions. Human remains from a Swedish site dating back 6,500 years showed birch bark tar associated with a 30-40 year old man suffering from with dental cavities. Could this be the first documentation of oral hygiene? It seems even cavemen were concerned with the build up of plaque.

The first records to mention chewing date from early civilisation. The ancient Greeks chewed mastiche, a resin obtained from the bark of the mastic tree. This was especially popular with Grecian women as a way of sweetening their breath. A Greek medicine man, named Dioscorides, pioneered the use of powdered mastiche as a medicine in 50 A.D. The ancient Mayans (who were the first to smoke tobacco) chewed chicle, the sap from the sapodilla tree, which grows in the tropics of Central America.

North American Indians also got in on the act, chewing sap from spruce trees and passing their habits on to the early settlers. In 1848, John B. Curtis sold lumps of spruce gum amongst the colonists making it the first commercial gum in America. By 1850, Curtis started selling sweetened paraffin wax, which soon overtook spruce gum in popularity. Sounds lovely!

Gum as we know it today has evolved largely due to the meeting of an ex-Mexican president and a New York photographer. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna introduced Thomas Adams to chicle in 1869. For the next year, Adams tried in vein to make toys, masks and rain boots out of chicle but every experiment failed. He was about to throw the whole lot in the river when he hit upon the idea of adding flavouring to the chicle to make a tasty gum. Doctors tried to poo poo his idea by claiming that chewing gum would “exhaust the salivary glands and cause the intestines to stick together”. Luckily, Adams decided to poo poo their poo poo and continued with his production.

News of Adams’ suc-cess filtered through to Kentucky and in 1880 John Colgan came up with a way of making the taste of gum last longer - but he kept it secret, maybe using a gum shield. Colgan’s Taffy Tolu Chewing Gum was an instant success. Adams hit back with his Tutti-Frutti brand, which was the first gum to be sold from vending machines located in New York subway stations.

It was around this time that peppermint first arrived on the gum scene. Chicle cannot absorb flavours very well, but sugar can, so when William J. White combined corn syrup with peppermint he took the sticky world of gum by storm.

William Wrigley Jr. was a young salesman who came to Chicago in 1891 with $32 in his pocket. In a bid to make money he offered merchants a free chewing gum with every can of baking powder he sold. In time, he realised that the chewing gum was proving the bigger hit so he switched his attention to gum. Four generations of Wrigleys later, it is now America’s largest chewing gum manufacturer with 20 factories worldwide.

In 1906 Frank Fleer invented the first bubble gum but it was never sold. This may have been down to the brand name of Blibber-Blubber. Walter Diemer was a more PR-minded person and perfected his Double Bubble Gum in 1928 and yes, it was bright pink.

The invasion of American GIs to British shores during the Second World War hastened the arrival of gum to Blighty. Such is the popularity of modern flavours, councils in Britain now face an annual bill of £150m in order to clean up the streets of discarded gum. Westminster council believe that there are 300,000 pieces of gum on Oxford Street alone. In 1992 the Singapore government took the radical step of banning gum outright, with a one-year sentence for anyone trying to smuggle the sticky stuff into the country. A little harsh maybe but anyone who has trodden in chewing gum will empathise with the problem.

Modern thinking suggests that chewing gum is good for your teeth; the increased production of saliva in the mouth neutralising oral acids. Breath freshening gum will take away the previous night’s curry and nicotine gum may help you quit smoking. Things have certainly come on a long way since the days of chewing on bark.

Chewing gum facts:

The first barcode ever scanned was on a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum in June 1974.

Britains buy around 980 million packs of gum each year.

You can’t make chocolate flavoured chewing gum because the cocoa butter emulsifies the gum removing the chewy characteristic completely.