Chewing Gum by Michael Redclift

The work of artist Ben Wilson is almost imperceptible in the context in which he exhibits. Instead, it is chanced upon through opportune downward glances when tying shoe laces or, as in my case, scrabbling for dropped keys. No Banksy, Wilson takes a more low key approach to his street art. He paints on chewing gum, the sidewalk’s ubiquitous grey-white splodges disgorged from the mouths of passing pedestrians and pressed by feet into small and relatively circular canvasses.

Whether geographer Michael Redclift had even heard of Wilson when he wrote Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste is unknown. Yet the narrative of Redclift’s exploration of chewing gum, which extends from Mexican rainforests to American wartime strategists and beyond, draws into question this apparently everyday object in much the same way. Like everything commonplace, the more you think about it, the less ordinary it seems.

Given its calorific value of approximately zilch, and that (and this is a personal observation) at times it can give the impression that apparently good looking, sensible people genuinely wish to impersonate cows chewing the cud, how did chewing gum come about? And, more to the point, how does chewing gum maintain its position as both a cultural artefact, and a multimillion dollar industry? Redcliff’s text presents fascinating, and often unexpected, answers to such questions.

Backdropped by the skirmishes which effectively set the territorial borders of Mexico and the United States, the story opens by following one character, Santa Anna, leader of the defeated Mexican army. Following an eventful life which swung pendulum-like from Mexican leadership to exile, Santa Anna found himself, in 1869 and aged 75, in New York. It was here he met his new business partner, Thomas Adams.

Together they attempted to make rubber car tyres from chicle, a latex type substance harvested from rainforest trees in the state of Yucatán, north east Mexico. The tyres were not a success. Yet a chance observation from Adams’ son that wax-based chewing gum which, though readily available, was of poor quality, led the entrepreneurs to shift tack dramatically. And chewing gum, made first of pure chicle and later flavoured with liquorice and branded Black Jack, was born.

In spite of the path breaking work by Santa Anna and Adams, it was William Wrigley’s decision to convert his own chewing gum manufacture from paraffin was to chicle, and then to aggressively market this new product, which made chewing the consumer phenomenon we know today. However, as chewing gum was being invented as a cultural product in the United States, Yucatán, which remained the sole source of chewing gum’s key ingredient until its replacement by a synthetic product well into the 20th century, was going through turmoil.

It is Redclift’s ability to tie these narratives together where this text excels. Readers are expertly guided through chapters detailing the civil unrest between indigenous Mexicans and their colonial rulers, the daily life of a chicle harvester, and the cultural making of chewing gum in the United States, and later Europe and the East. Further, while Redclift is a Professor at Kings College London, his work is a pleasure to read, free from the pretensions and obfuscations that so often mar the output of academics and make it inaccessible to anyone outside their own subdiscipline.

In presenting this compellingly rich narrative Redclift has a wider point to make – that consumption, and the political, cultural and economic structures that surround it, matter enormously. As he shows, what appears in one location as a consumer good buoyed with allusions of tastes and fashions may carry completely different meanings and consequences elsewhere. Indeed, Redclift demonstrates the direct links between America’s craving for chewing gum and various massive socio-political upheavals in Yucatán. In so doing he neatly exemplifies the agency held by consumers embedded in the act of shopping.

The only major letdown, therefore, is the presentation. The garish, mustard yellow, front cover encloses a text supported by unprofessional looking maps and pokey, excessively dark, black and white images which, because of their poor quality, serve little illustrative purpose. Though excellently written, with a thesis rich enough to make you think, and enough supporting factoid snippets to keep you armed for dinner parties or pub quizzes, this is definitely one for the shelf rather than the coffee table.