How do they make chewing gum?

Those flat, flavorsome packages are quite at home in our modern, everyday world   but gum chewing is not a new invention. The ancient Greeks exercised their jaws between meals by chewing on the rubbery sap from certain plants. The early settlers of our country chewed the resinous and rubbery sap from spruces and cactus plants.

Gum chewing may have been invented before the dawn of history. But the recipe for ours is only about 100 years old. In 1860, Santa Anna, the Mexican general who slaughtered our heroes of the Alamo, took a rubbery tree sap called chicle to New York. Chicle is a milky white latex taken from the bark of the sapodilla tree and it soon became the main ingredient in our best chewing gums.

The handsome sapodilla tree is a native of the rain forests of Yucatan and groves are now cultivated in other hot, wet regions of Central America and even in Florida. More than half of the world t s different food plants, plus many fiber, dye and resin producing plants had their origins in South America, Science is only now beginning to explore this, the most fabulous story of agriculture. The sapodilla is a part of this story.

The lush leafed sapodilla tree may be 60 feet tall. Its reddish brown apples smell like flowers and taste like pears. The sap is gathered from cuts alcng its thick bark. Pails 'of the milky liquid latex arcs boiled on the plantation and molded into solid blocks.

The blocks of chicle are sent to a chewing gum factory to be ground into powder which is purified, dried, melted and filtered. The chicle is then ready to be used as a base for the best chewing gum. Most recipes use about 28 percent chicle, plus corn syrup, caramel and the all important flavoring which gives the long lasting tang to a stick of good chewing gum.  

The two favorite flavors are spearmint and peppermint. Licorice, wintergreen, various spices and fruits are also popular flavors, Latex from certain rubber trees give a balloon stretch to the recipe for bubble gum. The boiled ingredients form a stiff dough and the final stages of the recipes are taken over by machines. Most of the dough is rolled flat, cut into small oblongs and packaged. Some is made into pellets and coated with candy.

In some chewing gum recipes, other latex saps are substituted for part or all of the chicle. Some of these latex trees are natives of the tropical rain forests of Asia. But the best gum is made from the sapodilla, a tree cultivated by the remote ancestors of the Incas, those amazing farmers who gave us more than half of the different food plants now enjoyed throughout the entire world.