Are Sweet Things Deceptive?

  "Bread, grapes, milk, honey: it is difficult not to see here little more than the fruitful—if not always tasteful—extension of many of Scripture’s most sweet-tasting metaphors" 

(Fulton 184)

    Sweet tastes have always been used to convey goodness; when we say "that's so sweet," it's a really good thing! So it is no wonder that sweetness is a high form of pleasantry and "goodness." When someone is feeling sour, that is a negative connotation. We're programmed to prefer sugary sweetness over bitters or sours: our bodies recognize sweet things as a source of calories, because sugary things, such as berries, typically have a good deal of calories. We can thank our ancestors that foraged for food for our ability to recognize sweetness because it enabled them to be fruitful and multiply because they were able to sustain themselves. Get it? Fruitful? However, anthropologist Stephen Wooding notes that our inate ability to detect sweetness and crave it has resulted in a sugar addition. However, he adds that "I believe it is worse than that. From a physiological standpoint, nicotine is an unwanted outsider to our bodies. People desire it because it plays tricks on the brain. In contrast, the desire for sugar has been in place and genetically encoded for eons because it provided fundamental fitness advantages, the ultimate evolutionary currency." 

    There is a certain religious irony to this supposed abuse of sugar; Adam and Eve fell from Paradise because they consumed a fruit (what was it anyways? a pomegranate?). Fruits are sweet. Apparently, sweet things have always resulted in bad outcomes, so it is interesting that scripture includes a lot of sweet metaphors, and in the context of today's artificial sugar tendencies, it becomes even more fascinating to reflect on how sweet things used to be regarded.