Alternative food

One of the best product the Americans invented was the chewing gum.
May be today it goes unnoticed, forgotten, but for me it is the symbol of an era when candies were expensive because the money available for "luxury" was scarce and the lust for them abundant.
A chewing gum could last weeks. When you were tired of it, you could just keep it somewhere and get it back when you felt like chewing again.
It was a kind of reusable food and long lasting past time.