Sales of the sticky synthetic rubber are down in the UK – are humans after 5,000 years finally developing some taste?
The mere financial cost of cleaning up chewing gum – an estimated £10m a year in London alone – pales into insignificance when compared with the social costs of this dreadful, indigestible substance. While some 300,000 pieces are removed from Oxford Street every time it is cleaned, and the price of removal is more than three times the price of the gum itself, the real problem with gum is that it is disgusting. Fortunately many people seem to be realising this, with sales falling by a reported 8% this year, and a decline in UK consumption since 2008 of 3,000 tonnes of gum. Finally, after an estimated 5,000 years of humans putting gum in their mouths, are we finally growing tired of this food we cannot eat?
Coinciding with Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement as the perma-chewing manager of Manchester United, for those of us who cannot stand the stuff, this drop is fantastic news. Historians will one day describe the way our streets were covered with a flavoured polymer that we would suck and chew before spitting it out on to the pavement, slyly bunging it under a desk, or foisting it under a chair. Would vagrants collect the gum and build shelter? Would animals suck on the gum for much-needed sustenance? No, future bored students of history, it would just stay there slowly evaporating our saliva, a doublemint petri dish for our germs until someone accidentally trod it into their carpet, or recoiled in horror after they poked their finger into it.
Raised on the fear stoked by my mother that gum would kill you immediately if you swallowed it, I steered clear of the little sticks of insta-death, nurturing a horror at the way people would chuck it into their mouths and chew like ruminating cows. Gum chewers were foolhardy risk-takers preparing for the place they would one day take in the circle of hell reserved for people who leave their gobs open while masticating. There is a medical condition – misophonia – for people who are sent into an instantaneous rage by the sounds of other people eating. I wish I had it so that I could claim to be medically intolerant.
Somewhere along the way, advertisers persuaded us that chewing wasn't just the means to a very specific end, the breaking down of food so that our bodies could swallow and digest it without choking, but that chewing was the journey. In one 1950s advert, Wrigley's spearmint gum assured you that "good chewing makes the job go smoother and faster". Some research suggests that chewing gum leads to temporarily increased mental performance although that clearly doesn't last long enough to motivate any sort of intelligent post-chewing disposal. Jerry Springer once defended his television show by saying: "It's just a show. It's not the end of western civilization. It's chewing gum," betraying something of the inherent worthlessness, the ephemeral empty experience of chewing gum and then spitting it out. To put it another way, when you buy gum you're putting the Jerry Springer Show in your mouth.
Adults no longer need gum to mask the smell of alcohol in the mornings from their bosses at work, the taste of their secretary's lips from their wife when they get home, or even to disguise the effect of heavy smoking. Gum used to be how you picked up women on long coach journeys, cleared your nasal passage, or brought an alpine breeze to your face, but as smoking and drink-driving have fallen out of fashion, so too has the heady romance waned from indigestible synthetic rubber.
Yet the decline in chewing has come at a moment in our history when swallowing is having a renaissance. The drop in gum consumption may be the victim of a rise in popularity of edible food products, with some 26% of the UK adults now obese. You may think that a few more gum products, flavoured with the taste of pork pie or Stella Artois, might be the answer, but that would still leave all the sticky, worthless mess.
Maybe in years to come, if trends continue, you'll be able to walk down the street or put your hand under a table without the unpleasant surprise of this revolting and bizarre substance. Let us keep spitting gum out metaphorically, rather than literally.
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