I tried searching around for this but have had no luck. When I was in middle school I remember a story going around about Cinnaburst gum that you were supposed to chew the paper too because it would dissolve and provide extra flavor. This is obviously not true. Anyone else ever hear this one?
I heard it as well and like you I found that it was false. Oh, lord, where was the Straight Dope when I needed you in 1989?
Marc
This UL might have its orgins in japanese rice candy. It has a chewy center and a wrapping made out of rice paper that disolves on your tongue. Its pretty hard to convince people that your supposed to eat the paper wrapping.
Mmmm…yum!
The paper isn’t paper, it’s made from crab shell proteins, IIRC. It doesn’t ‘dissolve’ but it does break up pretty well. You can chew it, I have chewed it, but I wouldn’t necessarily do it every time.
–Tim
Is it fair to assume, Homer, that your post refers to rice candy and not to Cinnaburst?
If so, I was also under the impression that the wrapping was rice paper.
You can definitely eat the wrapper on Trident gum, and it dissolves pretty quickly. It doesn’t add flavor but does add some interesting color to the gum.
You can indeed chew Cinnaburst with the wrapper on. The wrapper dissolves quickly and does change the flavor and texture of the gum, though whether for better or worse is a matter of personal tastes. I tried doing this with a piece of Carefree, resulting in a vile mess of gum and paper.
Crab protiens? I am willing to believe this. After all, the food dye carmine comes from crushed bugs. The glaze on junior mints also includes an insect extract. I am curious as to the source of this info.
Rice candy? No, I don’t know about rice candy. You know that whitish, papery stuff on the inside of the crab shell? I was under the impression the ‘paper’ was made from that stuff after being processed. Forget what it’s called, but I’m pretty sure it starts with a C. IIRC, when they started using it, they were pushing for it as a replacement for most candy inner wrappers, since it’s edible and retains the smell and flavor of whatever it’s wrapping.
–Tim
DocCathode said:
I saw a pack of Cinn-a-burst for sale so I couldn’t resist buying it for experimentation purposes.
Like most sticks of gum, each piece has a plain inner wrapper and a decorated outer wrapper. I wasn’t sure whether the “dissolve” claim applies to both wrappers, but I figured that if any wrapper would dissolve it would be the inner one. So I took two pieces of gum, threw away the outer wrappers and the gum and chewed the two inner wrappers. The sensation was not unlike chewing any other piece of paper. The wrappers did not dissolve. I did get some some startled looks from the people standing in front of the store. I thought about explaining that I was testing the wrappers to see if they were crab proteins, but I decided to just go home to finish my experiments.
Once home, I spit out the wrappers, it was clear that they weren’t going to dissolve. I took a piece of gum without wrappers and chewed it for a while as a control.
Next, I took a piece of gum with the inner wrapper and chewed it. The paper mixed so thoroughly with the gum that I would have to agree that this is an acceptable way to chew the gum.
In the interest of science I next tried a piece with both the inner and outer wrapper. Getting this started was most unpleasant, but again the paper did mix with the gum and after a few seconds I was chewing away.
So is this paper special in some way even if it won’t dissolve? I took a piece of notebook paper and cut it to the size of the inner wrapper. I wrapped it around a stick of gum and chewed it. The sensation was pretty identical to the result I got when I chewed the gum with just the inner wrapper.
This gum is strongly flavored. Perhaps it’s too strong for some folks and they prefer the dilution that occurs from adding the wrapper. Sometimes it’s fun to be weird (as my first experiment serendipitously demonstrated). So maybe some people do prefer the gum this way. But the paper is just ordinary paper. And from now on, I throw the paper wrappers away and chew the gum.
Here are a couple of Cecil’s columns that may be somewhat pertinent:
The amazing history of chewing gum
Does passionate kissing cause your chewing gum to disintegrate? Who wants to be my lab assistant on this one? 