chewing gum

chewing gum, sweetened product made from chicle and similar resilient substances and chewed for its flavour. Peoples of the Mediterranean have since antiquity chewed the sweet resin of the mastic tree (so named after the custom) as a tooth cleanser and breath freshener. New England colonists borrowed from the Indians the custom of chewing aromatic and astringent spruce resin for the same purposes. Similarly, for centuries inhabitants of the Yucatán Peninsula have chewed the latex, called chicle, of the sapodilla tree (Manilkara zapota or Achras zapota), an evergreen that flourishes in the rainforests of the region.

In the 19th century chicle was heralded by industrial developers as an equivalent to rubber. In 1869 Antonio López de Santa Anna, a former president of Mexico living in exile on Staten Island, New York, seized upon the idea of using chicle in place of rubber in the manufacture of tires as a potential means of funding his return to power. Inventor Thomas Adams, whom Santa Anna had contracted to develop a vulcanization process for the substance, was left with a ton of chicle when his experiments failed. However, while conducting tests of various formulas, he had discovered that the desiccated resin was insoluble in water and extremely plastic. In an attempt to salvage his investment, he began selling small portions of flavourless chicle to drugstores as an alternative to the sweetened paraffin that had itself outmoded the less-refined spruce resin for chewing. Adams patented his concoction in 1871, and, though the formula was not the first chewing gum patented in the United States, with the addition of various flavours it became the most popular.

To begin the gum-manufacturing process, blocks of gathered, hardened chicle are broken up, then screened and strained before being mixed with other gum bases, sweeteners, and flavourings during cooking. The blended mass is passed between rollers onto a belt for cooling, after which it is sugared, cut, wrapped, and packaged.

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After World War II various waxes, plastics, and synthetic rubber virtually replaced chicle in chewing gum manufacture. Artificially sweetened chewing gum found a wide market in the United States beginning in the late 20th century, while mint remained the favourite among a wide variety of flavours.