A n d r e w s G u m W o r l d

Barrow’s Newsagent, Lower Clapton, originally uploaded by Fin Fahey.

IMAGE: madehow.com

We’ll confess that it’s been a while since AndrewsGumWorld has deconstructed gum as something other than a cultural force, a litter problem, and/or a creative inspiration for  commercials, photography, advertising and blissful bubbles.

So, we pause for a moment to  remind ourselves where gum comes from (chicle, originally, but not so much any more…unless you buy Glee Gum).

While the image above may not be the perfect recipe (exactly how much chicle do you harvest….how long do you dry it and how hot is the air….and where, exactly, do you get those big pots?), but madehow.com has a great article on how modern chewing gum is made, including this nearly exact accounting of the ingredients to your modern stick of gum:

Federal regulations allow a typical list of ingredients on a pack of chewing gum to read like this: gum base, sugar, corn syrup, natural and/or artificial flavor, softeners, and BHT (added to preserve freshness). This vagueness is mainly due to the chewing gum manufacturers’ insistence that all materials used are part of a trade secret formula.

There’s a lot more detail to be found in the article, including the height of chicle trees (32.79 yards tall) and the importance of centrifuges, greased wooden molds, the exact size of a stick of gum (1.3″ x .449″) and more.

Chew on this, as they say….

Chewing Gum Dispencer, originally uploaded by Arch Angel..’.

DSC_1392, originally uploaded by Varun / वरुण.

 
PHOTO: Councillor Peter Goody, Croydon Guardian

We’ve not often included gum poetry in these posts; it turns out to be a fairly specialized field (although the writer and poet Roald Dahl famously included a gum chewer, Violet Beauregarde, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). However, our friends in Croydon, UK, who take their gum clean-up fairly seriously (we’ve visited the village before with its gum cleaning efforts, including in one of the very first posts of AndrewsGumWorld) — see one of the anti-gum tossing campaigns by the Redbridge Council above which involved gum targets — ran a competition last fall which offered local residents to wax poetic about gum.

There were three winners in the campaign coordinated by the Croydon Business Improvement Disrict (BID), and they were featured in a fall issue of This is Croydon Today. The winners included Penelope Boxall, Tamara Isted and Pamela Pope.

As the newspaper reported, the winners were pleased by the results of her first time at poetry:

Winner Penelope said: “I am absolutely delighted, as well as surprised as this is the first poem I have written.

“It was great fun to write something positive about Croydon. I may have to write some more now.”

Tamara has little time for inconsiderate people saying: “I do hate the way people drop gum on the streets. It gets all over my trainers.”

Without further ado or poetic desonctruction, here are last year’s three winning entries:

P E N E L O P E  B O X A L L

Finished gum ain’t your chum!

Sometimes, there’s bad press about Croydon

and this can be very depressing.

So let’s start with the small

though we think it nothing at all,

and make Croydon the best place to be in.

Sure, gum might be tiny and small

but it’s a real pain and mess for us all.

For when stuck on your shoes,

it’s a like a strong glue

and picks up all manner of things!

So when you have gum

and the flavour’s all gone,

and you want to get rid of it quick.

Wrap it to scrap it including the packet

and find it a home in a bin.

A bin is your friend, not your foe

as it tries to keep Croydon litter-low.

So in making our BID

we’ll save on our quids

and be the gum-free-est borough on show!

T A M A R A   I S T E D

On the pavement, on the roads,

on your trainers, on your clothes,

in the playground, in the park,

you don’t see it after dark.

Chewing gum is not a sin,

but put the goop in the bin.

Spitting it out is so not cool

so be good and follow the rule!

P A M E L A   P O P E

Spitting out chewing gum is a devilish sin,

PLEASE be an angel and put it in the bin.

For it clings to our shoes and sticks to the street

And often it’s found on a table or seat.

So come on you chewers, please have a heart,

And let’s keep our Croydon looking smart.

Gum Time., originally uploaded by loridz.

Wall of gum, originally uploaded by Mr. Bowman.

You can see a much smaller version of this photograph below as part of the post about the mixing of metaphors when financial experts talk  about the current “chewing gum” rally that’s currently driving the stock market.

 However, it’s also a great photo on its own, and it features a wall in Seattle outside one of the improv theatres there, Unexpected Productions, and it deserves to be featured on its own (and, if you click through to Flickr, you’ll see some Notes highlighted on the pic from Mr. Bowman, who posted the original shot).