Not long ago, I wrote about bone char used in filtration and purification of sugar. I had lots of feedback on that topic, and it inspired me to delve into another consumable head-scratcher: A phrase I read on a package of gum — plastic free.
At first, I assumed it was in reference to the packaging, which was a simple cardboard box with the loose gum pieces inside. They weren’t wrapped in plastic, which I appreciated.
But it nagged at me, so to the internet I turned. Yep, plastic is an ingredient in chewing gum.
Before delving into this current method of making gum, I’ll catch you up a bit on the history of gum. According to an article on the Smithsonian Magazine website, the ancient Greeks chewed a plant-based chewable substance.
Centuries ago, Scandinavians may have chewed birch tree tar, and Native Americans chewed spruce tree resin — which European immigrants joined in on, and Mayans and Aztecs chewed sapodilla resin called chicle.
Just as now, people used these varied gums to clean their teeth and especially to improve bad breath. We’ve all been there, right?
In the 1850s, John Curtis opened the world’s first chewing gum factory in Portland, Maine. He made it from spruce tree resin, which he coated in cornstarch to keep the strips from sticking to each other. This turned out to be a less-than-ideal substance to make gum from, as it didn’t taste super and became brittle as it was chewed.
In the late 1800s, an inventor in New York got a supply of chicle from Mexico, boiled it, hand rolled and then cut the substance, and sold it as chewing gum at drug stores; apparently, each batch sold out within hours.
By the 1880s, chicle was widely popular, and the inventor, Thomas Adams, was making five tons of gum daily.
Shortly thereafter, another business man, William Wrigley Jr., began producing gum — which made him one of the richest men in America by the time he died. He launched Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint in Chicago, and used large marketing campaigns to outsell the competition.
By the 1920s, on average, Americans chewed more than 100 sticks of gum per year. The large industry was, of course, detrimental to the natural resource of sapodilla trees in South America.
After World War II, gum manufacturers began switching to synthetic substitutes for chicle. By 1980, the United States no longer imported any of this tree resin.
Now, most gum manufacturers make their products from petroleum. The FDA has approved butadiene-styrene rubber, isobutylene-isoprene copolymer (butyl rubber), paraffin, latex, glycerin, petroleum wax, petroleum wax synthetic, polyethylene, polyvinyl acetate and lanolin among other base ingredients.
Of course, regulations do not require gum labeling to indicate which gum base the product recipe contains. Most companies use some form of plastic.
Many of us try to avoid putting plastics into our bodies — a task which seems to be getting harder and harder to maintain since it seems to be sneaking into everything — so we can add most gums to the list of what not to consume.
The plastic-free gum I noticed is sold at Mountain People’s Co-op. Personally, I’m not much of a gum chewer — my jaw gets tired too quickly to make it an enticing habit for me. But this new information, on top of that about bone char sugar filters has shattered my faith in eating anything not grown myself or by a farmer I know and trust.
ALDONA BIRD is a journalist, previously writing for The Dominion Post. She explores possibilities of local productivity and sustainable living in Preston County.
