Growing up as a chubby kid who tried to convince her parents that candy belonged at every meal (a real life Augustus Gloop, if I may), one of my favorite books was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And though I'd dream for a mug of the chocolate river, my favorite of Willy Wonka's creations was the three-course chewing gum. Tomato soup, roast beef, and blueberry pie in one piece of gum? The possibilities! While you can find some commercial versions of flavor-changing gum at the supermarket today, my fingers are crossed for a three-course meal sometime in the near future.
Image Credit: (stevendepolo/flickr)
To get any sort of flavor in a chewing gum in the first place, a process called microencapsulation is used, in which a core of tiny flavor particles is surrounded by a shell coating to produce minuscule spherical capsules – we're talking diameters of roughly a couple hundred micrometers in size [1]. Chewing gums contain these little flavor microcapsules; the core of each microcapsule is usually some sort of liquid flavoring, and the shell is made of crosslinked proteins which stabilize the core material, isolate the core from the chewing gum base, and will break apart in response to the shear forces of chewing to release the core flavoring [1].
