Nancy Broer, age 11, of Dakota City, Neb. For her question:

How do they make chewing gum?

In the green world of nature there is a chocolate tree, a caramel tree and a chewing gum tree. Naturally, these goodies do not grow in neat packages hanging from the branches. The plants provide the basic ingredients but we must work to make them into sweetmeats. Chocolate flavor comes from the cacao bean, It is bitter until it is prepared, sweetened and flavored with vanilla, Caramel and a thousand other sweets come from sugar cane and sugar beet, The basic ingredient in chewing gum is rubbery sap from the sapodilla tree,

This chewing gum tree is a handsome, tropical evergreen, The leaves of its glossy foliage are large pointed ovals. In addition to gum, the sapodilla tree also yields fine wood and tasty fruit. The wood is a warm brown color and very durable. The fruit is brown inside and out, The rind is rough and leathery, the pulp is soft and sweet,

The sapodilla grows in Central America, the West Indies arid the Philippines. Most of our supplies come from Yucatan, Guatemala and British Honduras. The sap of the sapodilla is called chicle, which rhymes with tickle, This chicle is the basic ingredient in our chewing gum recipes.

The tree trunk is gashed to let out the gummy sap, just as the rubber tree is gashed to let out the rubbery latex. The chicle seeps out of the wounded tree and is collected in canvas bags, The fresh chicle is a runny liquid, far too thin for chewing. It is now boiled until about 35% of the liquid evaporates. The chicle can then be kneaded into solid dough, The dough is packaged in 25 pound lumps and sent to the factory,

At the chewing gum factory, the chicle is first cleaned,  Then it is mixed with other ingredients and    cooked,    In most chewing gum recipes, chicle makes up from 20% to 28% of the total mixture. About 20% of most recipes is sugar in the form of pasty caramel, There is also flavoring to suit your taste. The flavors come from fruit and tasty herbs, also members of the plant world. The favorite flavors are mints. Spearmint is extracted from fresh garden mint and peppermint comes from the talk tangy peppermint herb.

Chicle, sugar and flavoring are mixed together in a giant revolving oven and heated to 250 Fahrenheit degrees. When properly blended, the dough is cooled and sent to machines which roll it to the proper thickness. Machines cut it into slabs and coat the slabs with a substance to seal in the flavor. More machines fold the little sticks of finished chewing gum into neat paper packages. From the time it is cooked; the chewing gun is not touched by hands. One operation after another is taken over by machinery.