I recently saw a who on the food network about chewing gum. It said that the primary ingrediant is rubber. What is the difference between gum and bubble gum? Is it the amount of rubber?
When I was young I was foolish enough to try to eat something without taking my gum out of my mouth and it lost its ability to stay together. What happened?
Originally, chewing gums were just that, solidified sap from certain trees. The “discovery” of chicle led to the huge industry we have today. Read an item a few years ago that the chicle has been replaced by polyvinyl acetate. I wonder if that is the rubber you refer to? Anyone got the SD on that? I believe chewing gum falls apart in the mouth if some sort of fat or grease is introduced. Perhaps an experiment with some butter or greasy french fries is in order.
I once had gum fall apart on me, but there was no other food in my mouth. It also tasted DISGUSTING. And I was having a theapy session at the time, not the best time to have a disgusting liquid in your mouth that is called Juicy Fruit. I spit it out in a tissue when the theapist wasn’t looking, BTW. YEECH!
Cecil gives the recent history:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_345.html
Actually, several cultures utilized several different tree resins since ancient times - chicle was used by the South American Indians, spruce resin by the North American Indians, and the resin of the mastic tree by the ancient Greeks, the name of which is related to our verb “masticate”. As observed by Cecil, European colonists picked up using spruce resin from the North American natives, and chicle became popular in the late 19th century. A timeline from about.com:
Chicle is a latex, and it isn’t that much of a “stretch”, so to speak, to call it rubber. Actual natural rubber is made from a different latex producing plant (many forms of natural latex were tried for making rubber, BTW. Edison managed to make rubber from goldenrod). Post WWII, most chewing gum has used a synthetic base rather than natural chicle.
Many sources tell how the first commercially successful bubble gum was made by an accountant named Walter Diemer in 1928, an employee of the Fleer corporation who was puttering around with gum formulations on his own time. Frank Fleer first tried to make bubble gum in 1906, but it was a flop. None of those sources seem to provide the significant difference between regular chewing gum and bubble gum, but I would suspect the ingredients aren’t radically different - probably just a matter of adjusting the relative amounts. Diemer aslo established the tradition of using pink food coloring in the bubble gum, rather than blowing disgusting looking gray bubbles.
I should have said “Mayan” rather than “South American” Indians.