What Happened to Chewing Gum?

One of the through lines in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school girls, repeatedly appear on-screen either smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In the film, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease that a production designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors. After the movie’s release, Topps reportedly paid $1 million to feature Travolta and Newton-John on trading cards sold with packs of bubblegum.

Grease arrived when gum was part of the image of a new kind of late-’70s teen rebel: a slick high schooler who dons leather jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks openly about sex, and masticates frequently. In the second half of the 20th century, gum also served as a prominent signifier for grit or sexuality in films like On the Waterfront and Pretty Woman, where its presence conveyed that Marlon Brando’s and Julia Roberts’s characters, respectively, didn’t conform to social standards. In recent times, however, people have been chewing less. From 2009 to 2015, store sales dropped about 4.7 percent a year in North America. The pandemic then intensified that trend: Today, overall gum sales are still down about 32 percent from 2018, according to data provided by the consumer-research firm Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley closed one of its gum factories in 2016, and late last year, Mondelez sold off its gum businesses (which included Trident and Dentyne) in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

On one level, the decline of chewing gum is just another knockdown effect of the pandemic. People chew gum when they come into close contact with others, Dan Sadler, a principal at Circana who studies confectionary products, told me—so fewer people going into workplaces meant fewer people munching on the product. At the same time, e-commerce has proved tough for the industry. Gum purchases tend to start from the same mental space as a grab for a Kit Kat bar: You don’t really need it but might lack the willpower to refuse when it’s in front of you in the checkout line, especially at a low cost. People just don’t shop for gum that way on the internet—these days, only 2 percent of gum’s unit sales happen online, according to Circana.

But I suspect for the chewing-gum business, the problem goes deeper than all that. Gum has also lost a certain cultural cachet. In a previous generation of films, the product was a bit edgy. Yet today’s popular culture has new symbols of teen insubordination—and, perhaps more important, it has fewer universal symbols of rebellion overall.

Chewing gum is an ancient practice, and its association with subversion predates Travolta, Brando, and Roberts by at least several hundred years. In the 16th century, the Aztecs chewed chicle, a resin sourced from sapodilla trees that became the inspiration for modern chewing gum. However, they frowned upon this practice: To the Aztecs, chewing gum often connoted selling sex, Jennifer P. Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University who wrote a book about the history of gum, told me. In retrospect, it’s a bit of a head-scratching connection, but Mathews speculated that it had something to do with the lewdness of mouth movements when chewing.

Whatever the genesis of gum’s associations with sexuality, when the habit first gained traction in the U.S. in the late 19th century, those connotations survived. After founding his eponymous company in 1898, William Wrigley Jr. turned to newspapers, streetcars, and billboards to advertise his gum. Many were intentionally suggestive: Wrigley ran ads in women’s magazines featuring models in only their bras and announcing that double-mint chewing gum could erase “all those hard, tense lines so devastating to the soft contours of face and neck.” His corporate rival, American Chicle, hired scores of attractive “sampling girls” who fanned out across U.S. cities and gave away thousands of sticks of gum. By the time the product spread to Europe during World War I, its reputation was cemented. Older Europeans understood gum as “this dirty American habit,” Mathews told me.

Gum-related anxieties were not unique to Europe—and they focused not just on sexuality, but also on the general distaste for seeing someone’s open mouth. By the middle of the 20th century, schools in the U.S. and the U.K. began banning students from chewing gum. The etiquette specialist Emily Post lamented in a 1935 column that she found it “impossible to imagine a lady as walking in a city street and either chewing gum or smoking.” When asked about her opposition to chewing gum, she explained: “It makes an ugly face and an annoying noise.” Another newspaper columnist, Inez Robb, wondered if it wouldn’t be possible “to organize for gum-chewers a compassionate group similar to Alcoholics Anonymous” to break their “noxious habit.” Robb underscored her disgust for watching people’s “jaws wagging” as they chewed.

Gum’s connection with subversion eventually made its way to Hollywood. Perhaps one reason was that using chewing gum to symbolize a character’s brash sexuality was less controversial than depicting sex on-screen. Until 1968, the Hays Code, which governed Hollywood films, outright banned “suggestive nudity,” and sex remained fleeting in teen movies even after the code’s demise, in part out of habit. For movie producers, chewing gum was a convenient symbol of rebellion that wasn’t actually that scandalous, Stephen Tropiano, a screen-studies professor at Ithaca College who wrote a book on the history of teen films, speculates. “Teen movies speak a shorthand,” Tropiano told me. “They magnify things and overemphasize things”—like gum chewing—“that [were] always seen as a symbol of rebellion.” The nexus of disapproval from polite society with glamorization in the movies could only mean one thing: Gum became cool. This carried all the way through to the ’90s: In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, who has a Valley girl accent and a closetful of expensive clothes, pulls out a wad of gum and holds it between her fingers while delivering a speech.

Read: Toward a universal theory of ‘cool’

Today, in an era when sex and gore are all over streaming services, chewing gum feels less taboo. Plus, every generation has its own symbols of rebellion: Vaping, for instance, might have supplanted cigarettes in pop culture. But even the notion of what constitutes a rebellious act today may have gotten more diffuse. As media have become algorithmically personalized thanks to TikTok and Netflix, “I wouldn’t say there’s a symbol that everyone could look at and read it the same way they used to,” Susannah Stern, a communications professor at the University of San Diego, told me. Drinking is seen as mainstream, if not altogether undesirable, and frank discussions of sex or sexual identity are not particularly shocking.

Rebellion of course still exists, but people have so many ways to express it now. As a result, what feels edgy to one person can easily be bland to another. Billie Eilish, a mainstream inheritor of emo and goth subcultures, rocked green hair for years. It didn’t read as that outrageous; oddly, Eilish generated media attention when she dyed her hair a more conventional blond. Painted nails on men used to be a clear symbol of queerness. Now straight, cis, male rappers and actors have embraced nail polish, perhaps seeing it as edgy. In a sense, then, the decline of gum might be one side effect of the modern smorgasbord of identities. There is no one way to be; thus, there is no one way to rebel. In this culture, our old symbols of boundary-pushing simply don’t have the power they used to.