AMERICAN DELICACIES.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 104, 15 April 1911, Page 4 (Supplement)

AMERICAN DELICACIES.

ANTI-CHEWING GUM CRDSaDE. According to the national secretary of the Christian Women’s Board of Foreign Missions, Americans should organist and patriotically support a national campaign against the practice of chewing gum, which, she asserts, is becoming more prevalent every- year. She complains that whereas Americans spend £‘3.200.f)00 a year on chewing gum they spend only a meagre £BOO,OOO on the conversion of the heathen.

It is true that Americans are credited n ith spending £20,000,000 a year on the compound known as ‘‘ice-cream seda.” and also £35.000,000 on sweets, but ice-c ream soda and sweets she regnrds as positive virtues compared with the insidious vice of gum chewing. There is good reason, it is maintained, for su*-h a national campaign as that proposed. American advertising walls >n every city, and even the fairest tracts of landscape, are disfigured by lnige posters inviting one to chew somebody or other’s gum. A recent telegram describing the trial o’ Mrs. Schencke, who was accused of the attempted murder of her millionaire husband. the well known pork packer, said that half the counsel in court were chewing tobacco, and that ''more than half the women were chewing gum.” At every station slot mainlines 'yield chewing gnm for a halfpenny one lump being sufficient to last all day. Tn the twopenny- tube trains one finds increasing evidence that the iaws of many women and men are moving almost as fast as the wheels, yet they are not speaking. They merely belong to the great and increasing r.rmy of gum cliewers, from which there is no escape

Manufacturers have requisitioned i’.pdical men to testify that chewing gum aids digestion, and dentists to prove that chewing gum cleans ami preserves the teeth, the reverse in both rases being nsuaJl.v true. It is hardly lir.ely. one fears, that the national campaign will have much success unless it is organised and maintained as well as the big industry which is attacked. In the meantime some of the leading manufacturers are preparing to invade Europe, in. the hope that the peonh> of the.older civilisations may take as kindly fo chewing gum as New York. Chicago, and even cultured Boston, Mass.