Gum.
The love of students.
The bane of teachers.
The decoration found under desks
Stuck to shoes.
Wonderful, amazing, stupendous, horrible, disgusting, jaw-dropping gum.
The sight of a popping bubble or a stick of gum being passed from a friend is a familiar sight at CHS. People debate the best flavor, the best brand, and whether or not they should, at all, allow kids to chew gum during class (hey, Extra over Trident any day). What harm does it do, some ask. Well, sugar-free gum has actually been seen to improve dental health and help people burn calories (a grand total of, possibly, eleven entire calories per hour chewing, according to WebMD!) Others point fingers at each other to blame for the distracting sounds, the yucky pieces of gum left stuck behind and left under tables to harden — something absolutely horrific to remove, by the way; because I sure don’t want to peel off hardened rubber mixed with spit off the bottom of a desk.
The life of a piece of gum is pretty exciting, of course. Starting from being packaged in a little aluminum wrapper (or just being solidified as a cube, but we know which version tastes better), it sits around for a while before being snatched up in a pack by some grubby teenager who can’t wait to get rid of their stinky breath. Maybe they’ll get passed to a friend or handed to a classmate when someone inevitably notices that someone has an enormous pack of gum that they’re willing to give out and is there to tax it away. Popped into mouths right before a test or used as fuel for homework, this stick of gum manages to be a ray of hope to whoever possesses it. It for sure helps when the math lesson gets a little too soothing. After a while, the gum will be spit out — maybe into a trash can, maybe under a desk, or maybe on a wall somewhere — ready to fulfill its next task: rot.
But let’s not lose all hope. Everyone has definitely experienced prying a piece of gum that’s been at the bottom of a desk for half a century and feeling the elastic strands stretch across their fingers when you accidentally place your hands under the desk. Some might have even popped it into their mouth to chew on for the next hour or so until they spit it back out and stick it under the desk again — hey, I can’t fault you. Free gum is free gum, right?
The relevancy of this topic must come with this news, of course: The administration has released exclusively to the Wolfpacket that starting January 2024, the very act of chewing gum will be fully banned at CHS, no longer depending on each teacher to individually decide the rules in their class.
Due to the urging of Mr. Tucker (after what is now known as The Gum Incident, where he threatened to find the student who had been systematically sticking gum under the back-row desks and promptly banned gum from the classroom) this school-wide persecution of gum will begin after winter break. And for good reason — in CHS’s efforts to constantly improve and become a more welcoming place for all, this policy comes with another set of reasoning: to become a more environmentally friendly space on campus.
Each conventionally made piece of gum is something that is unusable after a one-time use (right? right!), and, when left in trash bags, under desks, on the concrete, etc. is something that stays to pollute the earth for decades to come.
A typical piece of gum includes artificial sweeteners, added colors, natural and artificial flavors, and something simply written as “gum base.” While the ingredients in the gum base are trade secrets, they can contain plastics, latex, and rubber, which do not decompose quickly. I mean, who thinks that glycerol ester of partially hydrogenated gum or wood rosin, synthetic petroleum wax, and butyl rubber or rice bran wax are good things to chew up and leave somewhere? (Well, actually, to be fair, the last one sounds not bad…) 45 different synthetic and natural ingredients can be used in this gum base, which is a little bit scary.
Not to mention the flavors of gum: mint-flavored gum, of course, being the best to freshen one’s breath, but do you prefer spearmint, peppermint, wintergreen, smooth mint, polar ice, sweet mint, mint crystal, mint chocolate chip, splashing mint, mystery mint, or another type of mint that we haven’t come up with yet? Or do you prefer to go with the standard bubble gum flavor, pink lemonade, strawberry shortcake, coffee, key lime pie, green apple, lemon, cinnamon, or something else more “out there”? Gum offers so many options to discover oneself through its flavors, although some people’s floccinaucinihilipilification may lead them to think very little of it.
Of course, as modern art, gum is an amazing medium to use. Just think of Seattle’s Gum Wall near Pike Place Market, a spot for the public to contribute to the art. However, all this gum is absolutely horrific for the environment — when the Gum Wall was cleaned in 2015, off came 2350 pounds (or 1.175 tons) of gum, filled with plastic not meant to be recycled or reused. How many hours of chewing is that? How many flavors?!
Chew on that, huh?
