Gum - biting off more than you can chew?

The other day, we came across a chewing gum with turmeric and ginger flavour.

Now, I can take or leave chewing gum but I liked the idea of the flavour combination. Also, being advertised as plastic free caught my eye. I thought they meant the packaging but after a tiny bit of research, I found out that ordinary chewing gum indeed contains plastic.

Not sure about you but I personally don’t like chewing plastic at all. As it is rather rare that I have chewing gum, I never looked into the ingredients but what a mistake. Depending on the chewing gum, it contains fillers like calcium carbonate or magnesium silicate. Next up are elastomers (the chewy stuff) such as polyvinyl acetate which is being used as a film-forming ingredient in water-based paints and adhesives.

In the early days, a natural latex from sapodilla trees was used but has been replaced in the mid-1940s with the polyvinyl acetate. Emulsifiers (for keeping everything together) and softeners such as vegetable oil or lecithin (so that your chewing gum goes on forever) are also added.

True Gum is made in Denmark by 4 friends who had my aversion to plastic in their chewing gum. It is made with sap from gum trees grown by farmer cooperatives trying to preserve the rainforest. Ingredients are sweeteners (xylitol is a natural sugar alcohol found in plants), chicle gum (the natural gum of trees), natural flavourings, glycerine, gum Arabic, carthamus extract (from the Safflower), spirulina extract (an algae) and carnauba wax (glazing agent) from leaves of the carnauba palm Copernicia Prunifera.

So, all good sounding ingredients. True gum is available in different flavours although I just saw the ginger and turmeric version in SuperValu. The small chewing gum has a slight crisp shell with a soft, semi-sweet centre.

The flavour of ginger and turmeric is well balanced without being too sharp. The gum flavour didn’t last too long (but none of the other gums I have tried in the past did either) but the gum itself lasted a long time in case you are one who keeps chewing.

Another plastic free chewing gum is Nuud in the UK. Last year, founder Keir Carney went on to ‘Dragon’s Den’ but was rejected. In his pitch, according to Bristol Live, he said: "Did you know that every piece of regular chewing gum contains the same amount of plastic as a plastic straw? Yet while plastic straws are banned, chewing gum waste goes practically unnoticed.”

I am not sure if there is really enough plastic in each gum equal to the amount of a straw but the idea alone of chewing plastic is rather off-putting, no matter how miniscule the amount might be.

I still shudder by the thought that I used to swallow my chewing gums when I was a kid. Urghh! To be honest, I haven’t swallowed any chewing gum since reaching the age of wisdom.