Chewin’, chewin’ on and on.

I’ve been trying to chew more gum lately. They say it’s good for your teeth, though I can never seem to find a concrete opinion on that one way or the other. It does, however, help me cut down on snacking a bit, giving me something sweet to taste without ingesting a bunch of sugar and calories.

Chewing gum as a commercial product has been around since the 1800s, but the act of chewing on, well, chewy stuff has accompanied mankind since caveman times. Neanderthal children chewed on sticky birch tar, ancient Greeks chewed on mastic tree bark, the Inuit tribes of Alaska would chew on discarded whale blubber, and so on. It doesn’t take a behavioral psychologist to know that chewing on stuff, even if you can’t swallow it (or shouldn’t, anyway), is a calming, cathartic process.

I never chew the same flavor of gum twice in a row. As nice as chewing stuff is, if it’s the same flavor every time, it just gets kind of boring. That’s why it’s fun to try new and wacky flavors of gum. Answer a few questions for us, and we’ll try to figure out your favorite chewing flavor.