But this story isn't so much about why we chew gum as it is about what gum is —and where, exactly, it came from. As it turns out, the process of manufacturing gum is pretty simple. The basic steps include mixing the ingredients more on those in a moment in what's known as a sigma mixer , which kneads the gum until it takes on the consistency of bread dough.
It's then extruded from the mixer, rolled into sheets or small blocks, and finally cooled, cut, and packaged. The manufacturing of gum may be simple, but those ingredients are another story. Gum base itself is made of three things: a resin for chewiness, wax for softness, and elastomers that maintain its elasticity.
While early chewing gums were made from tree-based resins and natural waxes, these days, both ingredients are synthetically derived from petrochemicals. In other words, the gum you chew is essentially plastic and rubber.
According to the Washington, DC—based International Chewing Gum Association, gum is so shelf-stable that there is no law requiring an expiration date for it. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that. Natural and artificial waxes, which act as lubricants between strands of polymers, are sometimes combined to give the gum a better consistency. Other gum ingredients might include natural and artificial flavors; emulsifiers, which keep the gum soft; antioxidants, which keep it fresh; and humectants, like glycerol, to keep it moist.
Then, of course, there are sweeteners, both natural and artificial. The reason I can capture my daughter's attention with those huge bubbles I blow is thanks to a high proportion of the aforementioned elastomers—either natural or synthetic latexes—added to bubble gum bases.
According to John Milton, author of Vanity, Vitality, and Virility: The Science Behind the Products You Love to Buy , bubble gum is often made with styrene-butadiene SBR , a food-grade polymer that swells when it comes into contact with saliva, or food-grade butyl rubber—oddly, the same stuff that's used to make bicycle inner tubes.
Reading over the ingredient list of my mainstay sugarless Orbit Bubblemint, I noticed that artificial sweeteners occupied the lion's share of the text. In fact, it contains a virtual cocktail of the stuff, including sorbitol, mannitol, aspartame, acesulfame K, sucralose, and xylitol.
Other ingredients on the list: glycerol, the above-mentioned humectant; soy lecithin, an emulsifier; the antioxidant BHT butylhydroxytoluene , a synthetic preservative that's also used in rubber and— gasp —embalming fluid; and colors and flavors both natural and artificial. Of course, the most important quality to most of us gum-chewers is that last one: flavor.
Throughout your lifetime, you've no doubt been inundated with ads touting a gum's "long-lasting" flavor, a quality scientists and gum manufacturers have spent decades trying to improve, with good reason. As Mestres points out, "What other foodstuff remains in the mouth for a long time, like chewing gum does?
One solution, according to Mestres, is using varying concoctions of natural and artificial flavors with different degrees of solubility, so that "waves" of flavor are released in our mouths as we chew.
In other words, once the complementary sweetness is gone, that watermelon bubble gum you're chewing will lose most of its lusciousness.
This is a phenomenon I seemed to understand on a base level even as a kid. Back then, I often took the gum I was chewing out of my mouth, rolled it in sugar, and placed it in the freezer for future use. It tasted okay, but my mother, practically dry-heaving each time she opened the freezer, eventually put the kibosh on this practice.
According to Mestres, the main problem with flavor loss isn't the gum itself but our own mouths. Part of the reason gum loses flavor, he says, is that the receptors on our tongues become saturated to the point that, after a while, we simply don't taste it anymore. He claims that if we remove the gum we're chewing for a few minutes, take a sip of water to clear our palate, and start chewing the gum again, we'll find it has more flavor than we previously detected.
Still, over time anywhere from two to five minutes, based on my own unscientific research , our saliva absorbs both the flavoring and the sweeteners, leaving us with a flavorless wad that, unless you're a certain White House press secretary , eventually gets discarded. Until recently, I assumed the gum I chewed was at least kind of natural. Sure, I suspected it contained a 21st-century combo of artificial colors, preservatives, sweeteners, flavors, much like the one just described.
But I mistakenly thought the base itself was derived from a naturally occurring something-or-other. For years, that was true. Until around World War II, most gum came from the sapodilla trees that grow in the rain forests of southern Mexico and Central America.
Workers known as chicleros would scale them and cut zigzag patterns into the bark on their way down. In response to the shivving, the trees would secrete a Band-Aid of sorts—that chicle I mentioned above. The connection between her field and the name of the book is simple: The Mayans loved chewing chicle.
They started gnawing on it as early as the year , to freshen their breath or work the maize out of their teeth. But they weren't the first to fall in love with chewy saps and resins. Mastic, a resinous substance produced by a tree native to southern Europe, was chewed by the ancient Greeks; the Scandinavians chewed birch sap; native North Americans gnawed on the sap of the spruce tree. But the Mayans' love of gum was different—something akin to a present-day American's love of cheeseburgers, or a German's love of beer.
Later, the Aztecs would also take up the practice of chewing chicle, though they were far more rigid than the Mayans about who could chew it. Anyone of adult age who chewed it was considered totally vulgar. In the United States, European settlers picked up the habit of chewing spruce from Native Americans as far back as the s. But it wasn't until that a New Englander named John B. As the fortunes of Adams, Wrigley and other chewing gum magnates surged, many Latin American communities would soon pay the price:.
As is often the case, human appetites outmatched nature's resources. Unsustainable harvesting methods used to increase yields killed at least a quarter of Mexico's sapodilla trees by the mids, and scientists predicted total forest depletion within four decades. Fortunately for the trees but unfortunately for Latin American economies , chewing gum manufacturers soon began switching to cheaper, synthetic bases made from petroleum, wax and other substances.
By , the United States was no longer importing any chicle from Mexico. But chicle may be staging a small comeback. In Britain this year , a small Mexican company called Chicza just launched what it is marketing as "the world's first biodegradable chewing gum.
If not, I expect to see it soon. Amanda Fiegl is a former assistant editor at Smithsonian and is now a senior editor at the Nature Conservancy. Chewing gum has been around for centuries. Flickr user Mr. But have you ever thought about where it comes from? One's wife also chews chicle, but not in public Only kids and single women were allowed to chew it in public, notes Mathews. Married women and widows could chew it privately to freshen their breath, while men could chew it in secret to clean their teeth.
In North America, indigenous people chewed spruce tree resin, a practice that continued with the European settlers who followed. In the late s, John Curtis developed the first commercial spruce tree gum by boiling resin, then cutting it into strips that were coated in cornstarch to prevent them from sticking together. Santa Anna wanted assistance developing chicle into a substitute for rubber, and believed the riches he stood to earn would enable him to return to power in his homeland.
Adams began experimenting with chicle, but when his work failed to yield the desired results, Santa Anna abandoned the project. Adams eventually realized that rather than trying to create a rubber alternative, he could use chicle to produce a better type of chewing gum. He formed a company that by the late s, according to Mathews, was making gum sold across the country.
Chicle, imported to the United States from Mexico and Central America, served as the main ingredient in chewing gum until most manufacturers replaced it with synthetic ingredients by the mid s. In the 20th century, chewing gum made William Wrigley Jr.
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