The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats
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Dismissed as déclassé by gourmands, blamed for the scourge of obesity, and yet loved by all, the taste of sweet has long been at the center of both controversy and celebration. For anyone who has ever felt conflicted about a cupcake, this is a book to sink your teeth into. In The Taste of Sweet, unabashed dessert lover Joanne Chen takes us on an unexpected adventure into the nature of a taste you thought you knew and reveals a world you never imagined.Sweet is complicated, our individual relationships with it shaped as much by childhood memories and clever marketing as the actual sensation of the confection on the tongue. How did organic honey become a luxury while high-fructose corn syrup has been demonized? Why do Americans think of sweets as a guilty pleasure when other cultures just enjoy them? What new sweetener, destined to change the very definition of the word sweet, is being perfected right now in labs around the world? Chen finds the answers by visiting sensory scientists who study taste buds, horticulturalists who are out to breed the perfect strawberry, and educators who are researching the link between class and obesity. Along the way she sheds new light on a familiar taste by exploring the historical sweetscape through the banquet tables of emperors, the pie safes of American pioneers, the corporate giants that exist to fulfill our every sweet wish, and the desserts that have delighted her throughout the years. This fabulously entertaining story of sweet will change the way you think about your next cookie. Publishers Weekly In her thoughtful first book, Chen, a longtime magazine editor and writer, examines the physical, psychological and historical relationship between sweet flavors and humans, especially Americans. She begins by looking at how we taste by examining the human tongue, and taste buds in particular, meeting up with a psychologist whose work strongly suggests that some of us simply taste things differently. But while the tongue just absorbs this information, the stomach and the brain communicate what we like, what we want more of, whether we've had enough or whether one or the other or both wants to override the system for a variety of reasons, including emotional ones, and permit overindulgence. The author follows a technician whose work includes finding and using flavor components such as the "1950s strawberry." Turning her focus to stateside sweetness in the second half of the book, Chen argues that for a variety of historical and cultural reasons we Americans are uniquely vulnerable to sweetness because of external factors, thus, our uneasy relationship with it. The result is a large industry for and about sugar, another against, yet another for artificial sweeteners and connected others such as those for nutrition, exercise and diet. (Mar.)Copyright 2007Reed Business Information
Introduction 1Sweet Enough for You? 13The Myth of the Refined Palate 31The Real Taste of Strawberry 55Always Room for Dessert 79Sweet Tooths Anonymous 99Does Sweet Make You Fat? 119Let Them Eat Cake 135Guilty Pleasures 159A More Perfect Sweetener 181And Good for You 205Notes 223Acknowledgments 253Index 255
