Guest Author - Deborah Markus

Joanne Chen's The Taste of Sweet is not specifically about chocolate; but it's of high interest to any chocoholic because it explores the intense relationship we have with dessert: why we like it, why some of us like it more than others, and why dark chocolate is perceived as more chic than milk chocolate.

"Dark chocolate seems more distinctive than milk," Chen points out, because milk chocolate is just plain sweet. Sweetness is singled out for judgment by our tastemakers. Saying you enjoy spicy foods, or that you love bitter greens or plain yogurt, is a boast of strength; explaining that you adore desserts, the sweeter the better, is a shameful admission.

Once, in a restaurant, Chen asked for "and proceeded to devour" a piece of apple pie with ice cream -- after having already "made a good dent" in the burger she'd ordered for dinner. "Are you okay?" the waitress asked. "Why would I not be?" Chen thought, musing on the fact that "for some reason, when a woman manages to eat an entire dessert, it's surprising, and maybe a little uncouth."

This incident comes at the beginning of a chapter called "Always Room for Dessert," and it discusses the subject in writing both lively and drenched in historic and scientific research. Chen also goes into some detail as to why chocolate is so beloved in America and Europe, and presents some plausible possibilities, with a nod to the research of Sophie and Michael Coe in The True History of Chocolate, as to why chocolate is not as popular in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

I especially loved the first chapter, "Sweet Enough for You?" In it, Chen explains that "my sugar-centric universe crashed when I turned thirty." It was then that she met people like Bari, "who had a mystifying preference for Jolly Ranchers, lollipops, and gummy bears over a Snickers bar," and Nori, "who found chocolate cake unpleasant on the palate." She met people who would refuse an offer to share a dessert with the protest, "Oh, no, it's too sweet."

Intrigued, Chen explored why people feel so differently about different foods. Our tongues differ significantly from one another. Some people have "taste blindness" -- there are certain bitter flavors that they don't perceive because they don't have the taste buds to do so. Most people are "tasters," experiencing an ordinary spectrum of flavors. And a few are "super tasters": people who have such a concentration of taste buds that, as one specialist put it, "They live in a neon taste world, while non-tasters live in a pastel taste world."

I was pleased that Chen thoroughly dismissed the old idea so many of us were taught that taste buds fall on our tongues according to a specific map, with sweet at the front of the tongue, bitter in the back, and so on. This misinformation is the fault of a poor translation of a German scholarly paper written in 1901, and has nothing to do with reality.

The chapter "Sweet Tooths Anonymous" discusses clinical explorations of whether chocolate can be said to be addictive. Subjects who craved chocolate were offered variously real chocolate, white chocolate, sealed capsules of cocoa, placebo capsules, white chocolate and cocoa capsules, or nothing at all. The fact that only the real chocolate bar "relieved cravings" was taken as evidence that chocolate is not a truly addictive substance, since apparently "a craving for the sweet experience itself" cannot be seen as a real addiction.

In the same chapter, Chen describes people whose behavior sounds much like that of chemical addicts. These people never eat dessert when out with friends, but overeat sweets alone; eat quantities of sweets far greater than even a dessert-lover would (an entire cake at one sitting); hide sweets around the house; and one went so far as to "hoard packages of brownie mix and then eat the batter when her family wasn't home, afraid that the aroma of baked chocolate would alert everyone to her problem."

The eating of sweets by these people is obsessive and joyless. If this behavior were being displayed toward alcohol, the person would be pronounced an addict with a serious problem. It's true that no one has ever gotten into a car wreck due to driving under the influence of cacao, but if the consumption of a specific substance has come to dominate one's emotional life, isn't that a kind of addiction?

The Taste of Sweet is a fascinating read. Just be sure to bake a batch of chocolate-chip cookies before you sit down with it -- between the picture on the book's cover and the book's frequent mention of this favorite dessert, you'll be craving the taste of this sweet before you finish the first chapter.