About No-Sugar Treats: Intermission: The Palate of Available Tastebuds: A Subtler Kind of Sweet

I feel like I need to interrupt this series of posts, very briefly, with a point of information. This stems from an extremely interesting phone conversation with Bethanne and Christian last night in which, amongst other things, we were talking about the development and cultivation of fruits, the flavors of the wild fruits that we find, and the question of sweetness. This also connects to some of the points that Wrangham made about the differences between modern fruits and those available in a Pleistocene scenario.

Since my last post was about the 'palette' of ingredients for making these goodies, I'm prompted to indulge my paronomastic predilections and point out that you also need to develop your 'palate' to enjoy them! We are so conditioned to go for sweet, sweet, sweet. Many people can't really appreciate any flavors besides sweet and salty, (and fatty, because that is also a flavor) except in minuscule doses (and with lots of sweet and/or salt added - think sweet pickles).

Wild/uncultivated fruits and roots are less sweet, and in direct proportion contain more fiber and more tannins, minerals, vitamins and other compounds. As Wrangham pointed out, some of these compounds are toxic/unpalatable/undesirable. But many of them are important nutrients, and Wrangham also concedes that the increase in sweetness and palatability is always at the expense of nutrient density.

Consider this: it takes 2 feet of raw sugar cane to produce a tablespoon of pure, refined, white sugar. If you munch down on raw sugar cane, it's certainly sweet, but the flavor is much more than simple sweetness. The whole cane (which is, of course, a kind of grass) is as rich in minerals as grasses in general are famous for being. Refining all of that down to a tablespoon of sweetness is an essentially reductive process: everything else is lost along the way, not just the tough fiber.

Analogously, when we compare the level of sweetness of a wild or uncultivated fruit to one that has been co-evolving with humankind, the intensification of sweetness in the cultivated variety represents a similar reduction. Sweet at what cost?

I don't want to turn this into a rant and I don't want to get too sidetracked onto fruit discussion either, since I intend - and hereby set that intention - to make a longer post at a later date about different fruit trees and their evolution of sweetness.

But for myself, I feel grateful that between having a sensitive palate and a longstanding interest in and predilection for wild foods, as well as being forced to be adventurous by my body's lifelong intolerance of the standard fare available, I do have appreciation for the more complex spectrum of tastes. It is probably worthwhile to mention this up front, as something of a disclaimer for those who may want to try my no-sugar treats but aren't used to a subtler, more 'dilute' kind of sweetness (the 2ft of cane versus the tablespoon of sugar).

 I should also point out, though, that sensitive palate and adventurous spirit notwithstanding, I have 'mainlined' plenty of straight honey in my time. Fresh honey in new-drawn comb is the most incredibly sweet-tasting food you can come across. It's also far from being an unprocessed food: those bees had to fan-evaporate their gathered nectar from an 80% water solution to the 80% sugar, 20% water that is honey! Until moving from Hawaii with Phil a year ago, my main occupation was beekeeping and honey was one of my staple foods. None for me now, obviously.

So, if Ms Honey-hands the fruit fairy, which is who I used to be, can appreciate these subtler kinds of sweet, I think anyone can! Please stay with me.