Category: Food

Gum Too

February 16, 2025

My interest in gum didn’t abate, so I went and bought some types currently on the market! Let’s see what I thought…

These gum balls cost $0.15 each at a local candy store. The first was just a standard bubblegum ball printed as a baseball, and was forgettable both in texture and taste. The second was coated with a sour chemical so strong and unpleasant I couldn’t leave it in my mouth for more than a few seconds, so I didn’t even get to evaluate the gum! The one at the bottom was ‘colour changing’ since the dye coloured your tongue. It worked fairly well, but the gumball was so incredibly rigid I gave up trying to bite it lest I broke a tooth. It felt like trying to bite a marble!

Razzles are candies that initially have the taste and feel of a plain sugar tab (like a PEZ) but after a short while turn into gum, possibly via some chemical reaction with saliva. They’re evil in taste and texture, and give me the distinct feeling I’m eating something not safe for humans. Strongly not recommended.

‘Dubble Bubble’ looks like a musk stick before you eat it, and initially feels too hard for gum. With some persistence (and jaw pain) you can chew it enough to release a strongly sweet flavour that, while acceptable, is fleeting. Bazooka – a timeless classic – is similar, and I doubt the formulation has changed in decades. And yes, if you look closely you’ll see Bazooka still comes with the little comics.

As you can see I bought many pieces just to see the comics, and in the seven I opened no comic repeated. I didn’t enter the code at the website; I wonder what happens when you do?

Moving onto a more traditional pack of gum, here’s original flavor Hubba Bubba ‘Max’. I bought this since I misunderstood the picture on the wrapper to suggest a fluid center, but as you can see it’s just a piece of gum with a different coloured piece in the middle. The taste was ok as a sugar delivery device, but I found the gum extremely rubbery and unpleasant to chew. I’d never eat this again.

Bubblicious was the brand we never had in Oz back in my youth, and for a time was one of the market leaders here. Foolishly I chose watermelon (from several options) but this just tasted of chemicals and nothing like any watermelon I’ve ever eaten. The gum had a strange powdery feel to it as well, but perhaps that was because I didn’t keep it in my mouth long enough for it to get elastic.

This Bubble Yum was the worst I tried by a wide margin. As everyone knows I like fairy floss, but this tasted nothing like it and a great deal like marshmallow to me. I found it repulsive, and spat it out in moments. The rest of these will go to my students 🙂

And so we end with this unusual find: Juicy Fruit bubblegum. To my surprise it was fairly good! In fact this tasted a lot more like my memory of Juicy Fruit than the gum I bought a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t as hard and rubbery as all the others in this post. I even blew a bubble! I’d never buy or eat it again, but I’d say this is the only one I found somewhat enjoyable 🙂

Still Lovin’ It?

February 5, 2025

It’s been 636 days since I last reviewed a Happy Meal here on this blog, so let’s do it again. This time, it’s this one:

It’s a Pokémon happy meal! We had to wait in the drive-through about 20 minutes for this, and when I was finally able to order they didn’t even have frozen cokes! But that’s another matter and while criminally negligent I won’t hold it against them in this review.

That was in the box: a ‘sticker activity sheet’. Given I was expecting Pokémon cards there was a moment of rage that I only got stickers, until I found this in the box:

I’ll return to the cards in a moment.

The box also contained a poster with a scene on the back on which the included stickers (which I forgot to photograph) could be stuck. I daresay this would have amused children for not much longer than it took me to immediately trash both.

The apple slices were Pokémon themed, which was cute. KLS ate them in record time so I can’t comment on their quality but I imagine they were just as acceptable as Maccas apple slices always are. Also it’s worth mentioning that unlike Australia, you must get apple slices here and can’t swap them out for extra fries!

That’s the ~~Junior Burger~~ Hamburger, and i know you agree it looks absolutely delectable! I devoured it like a professional:

It was… edible. I’m a bit of an expert Happy Meal eater these days – although rarely in the USA – and I have to say that was in the middle range of the below-average USA Maccas food quality. Which is to say worse than it should have been but better than it sometimes has been.

We won’t speak of the fries.

The card pack contained four cards, one shiny. I don’t know if these are random or if everyone gets the same one, and I don’t even care enough to check. One of the reasons I got this meal was because I’ve started playing the Pokémon tcg app on my phone, and after opening dozens of ‘digital packs’ I wanted to open a real one. If you want any of these cards, let me know.

I’ll end with a comment on price. This was a substandard ‘meal’ with not much food and it cost over $6 including tax. Given that in Japan the very same meal with better food and better toys costs about $2.50 I think I’m safe in saying I was fleeced.

It’ll be at least 636 more days before I consider buying another…

Gum

January 30, 2025

Much like every other stripling, I had a healthy fear of chewing gum in my youth since I didn’t want it staying in my stomach for ten years (or however long the urban legend claimed). The only gum I chewed in those days came in trading card packs (then called ‘bubblegum cards’) or (usually in tiny pellet form) from the lolly machines at shops.

I used to think of chewing gum as an adult pastime – much like smoking – and never much understood it, only chewing until the taste was gone. Why would someone want to keep chewing such tasteless stuff? Unable to understand, I simply dismissed chewing gum as something not for me.

Those were the ‘big three’ in the 1980s in Australia – vintage examples no less – and while I don’t recall ever really buying it myself I can remember powdery sticks of Wrigley’s occasionally offered to my by someone who did. Since I was never one for spitting it out – much less sticking it somewhere – I’d always keep the little foil wrapper so I had something to put the gum into when I was done. There was another brand as well – Stimorol – but to me that was well into the ‘for grown ups’ camp, and I thought of it as a weirdly tasting lolly old guys consumed while they read the racing pages of the Sunday paper. Like Fisherman’s Friend.

And then, somewhere around maybe 1981 or 1982, bubblegum seemed to explode. All of a sudden every kid at school was chewing Hubba Bubba or Bubble Yum and blowing big ‘nonstick’ bubbles. Quickly we learned the more pieces you chewed the bigger the bubbles and had mouths full of the stuff! Schools banned it quickly of course, but that hardly stopped us. We’d smuggle packs into class, chew it surreptitiously, and put it in each other’s hair for laughs. As kids do.

Reading a bit about this now I learned that Hubba Bubba came to market in Australia in 1980 and that’s what triggered the ‘wars’. In the USA it was Bubble Yum vs Bubblelicious since Hubba Bubba had been retired (as a brand) even before their wars had began. My memory of gum exploding isn’t wrong either: the market increased more than tenfold between the late 70s and mid 80s, and bubblegum started being sold almost everywhere.

At first I was happy with the standard flavour since that’s all that was available, but a while later I got into orange Bubble Yum and swore it was best. And then Hubba Bubba released pineapple and I never looked back! I used to buy multiple packs at a time, and recall having a stash of a dozen or more packs secreted in a drawer in my bedside table (alongside the giant pile of Redskins). Even today I can almost recall the taste, although it’s been decades since I last bought a pack. Is pineapple even available any more? Is Hubba Bubba?

The bubblegum wars led to a massive increase in types of gum available. I remember Spurt (a type of gum with a liquid center), Big Tooth (a plastic tooth container full of gum), a dinosaur-head container with bone-shaped gum pellets, gum being added to ice creams (such as Bubble’O’Bill) and the various gums that came with tattoos, like the above type still sold in Australia today.

As with all fads, gum passed, although this was more due to increased awareness of the sugar content than kids losing interest. By the time sugar-free bubblegum turned up I had lost interest, moving on to a healthy obsession with chips, Mars bars and Polly Waffles. The rare times I bought gum was the occasional pack of Juicy Fruit since I craved the taste. I think Bernard still bought gum, as did some of my friends, but it was the chewing type and never bubblegum. I recall a brief flirtation with sherbet-filled fruit-shaped gum balls from machines, but even that didn’t seem to last long.

I almost never buy gum now, and only eat it when it comes with some sort of ‘candy toy’ I buy in Japan. After I started this post I became curious and picked up a pack of Juicy Fruit to see if it tasted the same. Imagine my surprise – and disappointment – to find the pellets are gone and it’s now a bland stick product without the wonderfully fruity taste. It has become a worthless thing; only fit for geezers dreaming of horses.

I’m sure gum will never die, but it may be that it’s long been dead to me. I’ve probably never really understood why anyone likes it, nor why it would be chosen over virtually any other candy lolly or snack. I suppose it’s just not my thing.

Do you chew gum? If so, why?

Robot Claw