Icons, Following the Stars, Status Symbol, Need to Associate

Need 1 : Icons, Following the stars, Status Symbol, Need to associate

Need :

Gum is fun. Gum is cool , Gum is healthy.

Chewing gum had also become ‘iconic'. It had come to represent ‘America' to civilian populations in Europe during the War, deprived of most daily conveniences, and who coined the catch-phrase of wartime London "…Got any gum, chum". Chewing gum was associated with ‘cool', in the forces and in the movies. Humphrey Bogart chewed gum in ‘Casablanca',and by 2001 Vogue magazine was still reporting that Sarah Jessica Parker, the principal

‘actor' in the highly successful Sex In the City television series, demonstrated she was "..still a real New Yorker", by the way she chewed gum during an interview.

Chewing gum was associated with the trappings of success, in sport and popular

entertainment. Between 1929 and 1933, at the time when sales of chicle to the United States were hit by the Great Depression, a small part of the ‘American Dream' seemed to have faded away. A Mexican author commented, subsequently, that:"chewing gum was one of the small pleasures which American families easily

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(Anda Gutierrez 1982, 114).

Wrigley's had proclaimed that ‘We Will Be Back', and fears that the American public would desert the product during the War proved unfounded. Deprivation often concentrates sensual preferences, and may not alter tastes. Chewing gum was a success of ‘association' –

institutionalised practices that the public shared with Bogart and Bacall, baseball stars and fashion icons. Post War, the swapping chewing gum cards became the perennial occupation of the ‘baby boomers' ; it replaced other vices with mastication, soon after sweet rationing ended in 1951 in Britain.

Chewing gum for Americans of the 20th century and beyond is likely a different

kind of behavior than it was for past gum chewers. Anthropologists have offered various

explanations for chewing-but-not-swallowing ranging from pain relief to the staving off

of hunger pains. While some recent research supports the chewing of gum as a substitute

for eating, it is in the context of weight loss (Levine, 1999), not to relieve scarcityinduced

hunger pains. If chewing Wrigley is different than chewing spruce flavored or

more or less unflavored chicle, what's the difference? Furthermore, is chewing

Bubblicious the same thing as chewing Orbit?

The candy-like usage strategy worked. For much of it's

history, chewing gum was a mild form of entertainment, engaged not for any medical,

nutritive, or social reasons, but simply for sweet pleasure

The shift that occurred during these years, potentially saving the gum industry from a

slow but steady decrease in overall sales, was one from fun-gum to functional-gum. The

US Surgeon General's warnings about the dangers of cigarette smoking slowly became

incorporated into strategies of oral satisfaction as smokers, under pressure from bans on

smoking in public places and work places, began to substitute gum for smokes.

Furthermore, though sugarless

gum was not particularly new in the early 1980's5, it was newly discovered that chewing

gum might aid in the prevention of cavity formation. An early Scandinavian study of the

effect of chewing gum on the suppression of dental caries found that chewing was only

effective when the sweetener was xylitol compared to sucrose (Scheinin et al, 1975). A

later study conducted from 1982-1985 confirmed that chewing xylitol sweetened gum

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was, in fact, better for dental health than chewing no gum at all (Makkinen, 2000). Gum

was no longer fun, it was healthy.

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