Unwrapping the History of Chewing Gum: the use of chicle in Mesoamerica stretches from pre-Columbian rituals to the revival of sustainable forest practices today.

In ancient Mexico, public gum chewers were thought to be homosexuals and harlots, according to sixteenth-century chronicler Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. In modern Singapore, they are petty criminals and can face a year of jail time. In the movies, they have been bad guys and nervous flirts, like the young Marlon Brando courting Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront . In schools, they are students hoping for an advantage at exam time. In the US, they may be rude teenagers purposely upsetting their parents.

What they all are chewing is chicle , a word derived from the Nahuatl tzictli , made from the resinous latex of the Malinkara zapota tree native to the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America. Like its cousins copal and rubber, also collected by tapping trees in the wild, chicle was highly esteemed in Pre-Columbian times for the many everyday uses of the tree's sap as well as its fruit, bark, and leaves.

The congealed sap was not burned for incense as copal was, nor was it batted around a Maya ball court like rubber, but chicle did produce value beyond the pure addictive pleasure of moving one's mouth. A virgin chicle tree can produce thirty pounds of sap (though trees routinely harvested after a five year rest period usually produce only one-tenth of that). Boiled and poured into brick-like molds, chicle becomes a high priced export.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The leaves and bark of the chicle tree contain astringent chemical compounds called saponins, which when steeped in tea can serve as an emetic, a sedative, and a diarrhea cure. The fruit itself, called sapote, or more properly sapodilla, has a fuzzy brown skin covering a yellow custard-like flesh that tastes of caramel and malt. In Mexico the tree is known as chicozapote , a tall and thick evergreen with leathery leaves and almost invisible white flowers.

Several similar but botanically unrelated fruits are also called sapote, from the Aztec word tzapotl meaning "soft fruit." Some are known by their distinct colors of black, green, white, and yellow. One such fruit, the mamey sapote, was extravagantly praised by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his description of the New World's natural resources, Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (1526), as "a graceful and elegant fruit, of very soft taste ... a tawny flesh that tastes like peaches and apricots, or better, and it smells very nice ... it cannot be improved upon, nor can one find another better fruit."

Although Diego de Landa, the sixteenth-century bishop of the Yucatán who infamously burned the Maya codices, never admitted to chewing chicle himself, he did praise the taste of sapodilla in his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán , written about 1566. "There is another leafy and beautiful tree that never loses its leaves and doesn't flower, which bears a fruit of such sweetness, even more than the one I already mentioned, small and very sweet, so good to eat and...