If you are roughly my age , born somewhere between 1975 and 1985, you have a very specific muscle memory for one moment in childhood. You are in the card aisle of the corner drugstore. You have a crumpled dollar bill in your fist. You hand it to the cashier. She hands you a wax paper pack of Topps baseball cards. You tear it open and the first thing that hits you is the smell.
The smell is artificial. It is the smell of bubble gum that was never really bubble gum, layered over the smell of cheap cardboard and printer's ink. Then comes the texture. A flat pink stick, dusted in a kind of chalky powder, wrapped in flimsy cellophane that is already half unglued from the wrapper. You would eat it anyway. We all did. We ate it instantly or we saved it for later, but we ate it, and we never finished one of those sticks, because they got hard and brittle in about four seconds. Then there, the flavor, that one weird synthetic strawberry, that would fade into something that tasted like the wrapper.
I was born in 1978, which meant I came of age during what collectors now call the junk wax era . This was the late 80s and early 90s when card companies were printing millions of copies of every player and putting them in every corner store in America. The packs were a quarter in 1986, fifty cents by 1989, a dollar by the time I was old enough to have my own money. I bought hundreds of them.
What Would Actually Happen If You Ate One Today
This is the question I have been quietly wondering about for thirty years, so let me just walk you through it. If you are holding a baseball card pack from, say, 1989, one that has been sitting in a box in someone's closet since Reagan was president and you unwrap the gum for the first time today. It will be hard as a rock. Chewing gum left to itself does not stay soft. The plasticizers and moisture that made it chewy have mostly evaporated over 35 years. What is left is a chalky pink puck. Your jaw muscles will not enjoy this.
The flavor will be gone. It will not taste like bubble gum. It will taste like the idea of bubble gum, which is a faint, sweet, vaguely vanilla residue. The first ten seconds will trick you into thinking it is going to be good. Then your brain will give up. The wrapper will be brittle. Whatever wax papery thing they used to wrap it in will have dried out and probably cracked in places. You will find tiny flecks of it in your mouth. Not dangerous. Just not great.
Probably not dangerous, but technically not recommended. Topps actually consulted a dentist for a feature where they tested gum from 1946, and the doctor said, flat out, “You should not chew that gum.” His actual concern was that the gum could dislodge a filling or crack a tooth, not that it would make you sick. Sugar gum preserves itself in its own awful way.
You will regret this about thirty seconds in. The worst case outcome is not poisoning. The worst case outcome is that you will have a stale, sour, crunchy piece of rubber stuck to your shoe and the memory of the Bubblicious era, will be permanently stuck in your brain.
What should you do if you ever get the craving to chew this childhood gum like me? Stick to reliving those memories in your head, and don't chew the gum!
 |
| Find him on X @brogan78 | on Instagram | on Facebook | or on Youtube |