The Bitter and the Sweet

Most of the readings and class discussion from this week were about one concept -- God tasting sweet. This correlation of God with sweetness and sweetness with good can strike us, with our modern understanding of sugars and calories, as strange. Sweet, to us, doesn't have the same associations as it would have had a few centuries ago. As understanding of our perceptions is filtered through experience, we now associate sweet with "junk food," with artificial sweeteners, diabetes and obesity. We now understand too much sweetness as a negative thing, something that leaves us feeling queasy and bloated. As Rachel Fulton tells us, this helps explain why modern translations of many of the medieval texts she deals with choose to translate the repeated words for sweet as other words, such as "dulcet" or "mellifluous," because modern readers would would react negatively to what they call "an untruthful impression of saccharinity" (180).


In addition to being associated with God, sweet within the medieval model of the human body, humoral theory, was also linked to the concept of health and healing. In fact, this association may have contributed to the association of sweet with God, since Christians see little as more healing than the presence of God. I think it's fascinating how much this association has changed. Not only has sweet been relegated to the top of the food pyramid as something we should enjoy in moderation, now considered an agent of poor health instead of healing, the associations our culture has with bitter have also changed drastically.


We have many expressions where the taste of bitter represents what is bad or undesirable -- we may say that a piece of news is "a bitter pill to swallow", that we have to take "the bitter with the sweet", or fight "to the bitter end." There are others, of course; these are just a couple examples of the bitter taste being a stand-in for what is considered unpleasant. Heck, even when associated with healing, such as with medicines, we still label it an unpleasant taste. However, bitter taste can  be enjoyed, and more and more our culture is telling us that it should be. Gourmet coffees, craft beers, and dark chocolates are all examples of bitter tastes that are celebrated and enjoyed and the health conscious movement pushes bitter greens like spinach, arugula, and kale. Although in class we have highlighted the perception of bitter as a poison detection system, bitter can have health benefits too, not just in medicines, but in nature.