The chewing-gum club

Why are people bothered by this harmless vice?

On the train a man with a long beard is reading Proust. As he reads he is chewing gum. His beard trembles. And tiny wafts of spearmint from his side of the aisle spirit me back to the beech woods of Sussex, to childhood afternoons spent crashing through the bushes on the slopes of the South Downs, stomping wild mint in the undergrowth, enveloped by the smell of it, a formative experience that may explain occasional later cravings for polo mints and mojitos.

Other passengers in the train are not so moved. The gum-chewer’s immediate neighbour is irritated enough to change her seat, muttering something about the need for ‘No Chewing’ signs on the carriage windows. The offending party remains oblivious. He is ruminative, distracted, lost in a readerly trance, jaws moving slackly, mouth agape, eyes and hand roving over the opening section of Swann’s Way, maybe the passage where Proust’s narrator is thrown into a transport of memory by the scent of hawthorn blossom on the altar of the church at Combray.

And I am remembering my induction into gum-chewing at the hands of my more worldly cousins, when we ran wild as children in the Sussex beechwoods. They were the founding members of the highly secret Chewing Gum Club (how I longed to join); their habit was to hide their supplies – and the residue – on the roof of our grandmother’s garden shed.

Our grandmother was a disciplinarian from South Africa. She regarded chewing gum with a degree of distaste that seemed excessive to us: in her eyes it was an alien, American habit, to be discouraged along with comic books and blue jeans, lest we grow up slovenly and uncultured. The rubbery strips with their chevron patterns would have been better used for mending bicycle tyres (this wouldn’t have worked, of course), so that we could go out and get some exercise. Also, she stressed, the roof of the shed wasn’t strong enough to bear our collective weight as it increased year by year. The Chewing Gum Club was banned, then secretly reconstituted again. Each summer holiday, for a time.

The things we do with our mouths

Childhood, or adolescence, is the time for chewing gum. If adults chew anything it should be a grown-up addiction, like tobacco. There’s something amiss about the sight of a gum-chewing adult. Proust would certainly not have approved. Yet I must admit I chew gum myself from time to time (any flavour as long as it’s spearmint). Never in public – no fellow rail passenger need wrinkle their nose at me – only at my desk, as an aid to concentration.

Our mouths are the busiest parts of our anatomy, constantly on the look-out for diversion. We yearn to kiss and be kissed; we worry about oral hygiene; we talk too much. Given all the things we do with our mouths – smoking, overeating, bearing false witness – gum-chewing can surely be seen for what it is, a harmless vice, one that may save us from worse. Maybe that’s why it’s a touch embarrassing. Chewing gum is a substitute for something else, for food, for the breast, for sucking the thumb, biting the nails, cleaning the teeth or – laced with nicotine – for tobacco.

Orally-inclined cultures – not just ours – have many ways of displacing and socializing such impulses. In India the sidewalks are red with the expectorations of betel nut chewers. In Somalia, during the US invasion, gum-chewing American GIs came face-to-face with Somali militiamen who had their own chewing habit – the coca-like stimulant leaf, qat.

But in other cultures – these would be more to my grandmother’s liking – chewing is not the done thing at all. After the Gulf War surplus US army field rations were air-dropped onto Iraqi Kurdistan. (I ate some. A tip of the hat to the government and people of the United States.) Each of these MREs – meals-ready-to-eat – contained an array of plastic sachets containing passable versions of chicken gumbo, hash browns or chocolate chip cookies. And in each MRE package, there would be a single pack of chiclets, the hard candy-covered version of gum that is popular in the US.

There was discussion among the fleeing displaced Kurds as to what these little oblong white things were. Were they a drug, one of them asked, that strengthened the American soldiers in battle? Or a slow-burning explosive to heat the food? Or a firelighter? Or were they actually food to be eaten? They had a sweet taste – so were they a kind of sugar? Might they be poison? Most of the puzzled recipients of this American largesse ended up throwing the chiclets away.

Where chewing gum is a crime

The best-known case of a chewing-gum averse culture – an anti-America – is Singapore, the tiny, exceedingly tidy, city-state where hardly anything is allowed (though I think they let you read Proust). Chewing-gum is one of the many things that are banned in Singapore, which suggests that there must be something good about it. The Singapore gum ban was intensified recently with the announcement of draconian punishments for attempted import. At a press conference to publicise the new law a government spokesman announced that the penalty for smuggling gum into the country would be a $6,000 fine and a year in prison.

One cannot but be struck by the name of the Singapore government’s representative on this matter. Of course we should not be chauvinistic, nor anglophonocentric. We should not laugh at other people’s names. All our names sound odd and foreign somewhere in the world. Let it be noted, though, that the name of Singapore’s spokesperson for the anti-chewing gum measures, as reported in the Straits Times, is Ms Chew. ★