"High Sweetness" Ahead: No One Can Stop Humanity's Pursuit of Sweetness!

In the long process of human evolution, sugar, which can quickly replenish a large amount of energy, has always been the most useful "life-saving straw" at critical moments. For this reason, the natural yearning for the "sweetness" of various sugars, the most important taste, has been deeply engraved in human genes long before the birth of civilization. No matter where you are or what culture you grew up in, no one will refuse this sweet temptation, even if it means taking risks.

#1 Mother’s Taste: Lactose

Image source: Pixabay

As mammals, the first sweet substance that humans eat after birth is usually their mother's breast milk. For humans, lactose is the most "natural" sugar and one of the most important sugars for health. The galactose contained in lactose is a component of the glycolipids that make up the brain and nerve tissues. It is very important for the intellectual development of infants. It can promote the production of cerebrosides and mucopolysaccharides and the production of certain lactic acid bacteria in the human intestine. It can also inhibit the growth of putrefactive bacteria and help intestinal peristalsis. When lactose produces lactic acid in the human intestine, it is also beneficial to the absorption of calcium and other substances, preventing the occurrence of rickets.

With the domestication of large livestock such as cattle and sheep, it was no longer difficult for early humans to obtain enough lactose, but there were still some people who were "unable to enjoy" it - because they were born with lactose intolerance. Historically, this symptom has greatly exacerbated the cultural differences between farming and nomadic civilizations: because it is difficult to consume dairy products in large quantities like nomads, farming peoples generally regard nomads' food as a "poor diet" and a symbol of barbarism. In addition, lactose intolerance can also cause trouble when different cultures come into contact: it is said that when the early Vikings crossed the North Atlantic and shared dairy products for consumption with polar Indian tribes such as the Dorset and Inuit in the Arctic Circle, the latter mistakenly thought they were poisoned because of the symptoms caused by lactose intolerance. In a sense, lactose intolerance can be said to be one of the oldest "black humor" in human history.

#2 A good alternative: Honey

Humans who cannot tolerate lactose have to find alternatives, and the best one is honey. During the production process, bees remove excess water from honey, so the sugar content of honey (including fructose and glucose) can be as high as 80%. In addition, honey itself has a bactericidal and antiseptic effect, so it is definitely the best choice as an emergency material.

Image source: Pixabay

However, before the popularization of modern beekeeping technology, the production of honey was really pitiful. It often takes months to form a wild beehive that can produce a large amount of honey. The primitive way of collecting honey is usually to light a fire directly, smoke the bees with thick smoke, and then destroy the beehive to collect honey. Some people even cut off the whole honeycomb and take it away. This "killing the chicken to get the eggs" method of collecting honey is very destructive, resulting in honey being the exclusive property of hunter-gatherers in the forest for a long time, or a luxury for a few wealthy families. However, wild honey may also be contaminated by bees collecting flowers of poisonous plants (such as Tripterygium wilfordii and Veratrum, which are often used as natural insecticides), or breeding botulism. Therefore, eating honey in ancient times required a spirit of adventure.

#3 Gifts from Plants: Fruit and Malt

In contrast, another source of glucose and fructose, fruit, is more common and accessible than honey. But before very recent times, using fruit as a source of sweetness was also unreliable: in the harsh nature, wild fruits are much smaller than those bred by humans. In order to avoid being eaten before the seeds are ripe, wild fruits will retain a high fruit acid content for a long time, making the fruit sour and inedible, and only become sweet quickly after the seeds are ripe. This narrow "time window" severely limits the picking of fruits. If you are a little slower, only rotten and spoiled fruits that may be harmful to health will be left.
Most of the sugars that ancient people could occasionally eat were products of starch fermentation. In ancient times, this kind of sugar was called "Ye". The method was usually to germinate wheat seeds, then chop them up, and use the enzymes contained in them to ferment various starch-containing grains, thereby producing sugar foods through saccharification reactions. Since the raw materials were everywhere, various types of maltose became the only sugar that ordinary people from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast could eat in ancient times. However, due to the limited surplus food in ancient society, the amount that ordinary people could eat was not too much.

#4 Sweet Grasses and Trees: Sugar Cane, Beets, and Maple Sugar

Among all the sugars produced by humans, sucrose is the safest and cheapest. As a large herb native to New Guinea and South Asia, sugarcane was not cultivated until after the first year of the Christian era. In China, the earliest records of sucrose (brown sugar) production did not appear until the 6th and 7th centuries. By around the 10th century, sugarcane cultivation had spread to India, Mesopotamia, and East Africa, and was eventually discovered by Spanish merchants in the Age of Exploration, and further introduced to the American colonies.

Before the establishment of modern mechanized agriculture, the labor cost of sugarcane has always been a long-standing problem, and it has directly led to the triangular trade. The large amount of land preparation and irrigation required for growing sugarcane is already quite time-consuming and laborious, but the process of boiling and refining sugar cane is even more difficult: the sugarcane juice must be dehydrated and solidified in the refinery to form brown sugar, and then further refined into white sugar. This process is an extremely harsh test for the workers. The extremely hot indoor environment can easily lead to a large amount of dehydration, and even cause the workers to fall into a coma.

Compared to sugarcane, another herb used for sugar production, beet, is a somewhat sweet root vegetable suitable for making soup. It is not cultivated in labor-intensive plantations like sugarcane, nor has it become a "strategic material". It was not until 1747 that beets were discovered to be used to extract sucrose, and it was not until the early 19th century that the beet sugar industry matured. Today, this sugar crop, which is mainly grown in temperate regions, has formed a situation of "sharing the world" with sugarcane, and its planting area is second only to the latter. However, due to their different growth environments, the two do not constitute a competitive relationship.

Image source: Pixabay

In addition, maple syrup also has a place in the list of human dessert materials. Its producer is the sugar maple tree distributed in North America, which has the "special skill" of converting stored starch into sucrose. It can be easily collected by cutting a sap hole in the skin of the sugar maple tree. Compared with the "large quantity and fullness" of sugarcane and beets, the annual output of tens of thousands of tons of maple syrup cannot be used as a cheap sweetener. However, the rich minerals and vitamins in maple syrup make it have much better nutritional content than sucrose. Therefore, maple syrup is often used as a condiment for various high-end desserts and dishes, and is also used to make popular toffee.

Although there are numerous sources of sweet substances in nature, sweetness has always been a rare taste in human diet until the large-scale production of sucrose. Today, in order to make up for the lack of natural sweeteners, people have embarked on the road of producing artificial sweeteners, from saccharin to xylitol, relying on "zero-energy" sweeteners to avoid excessive energy intake. As one of the "achievements" of human evolution, the pursuit of sweetness will inevitably become an important part of human life history and will continue in the future.

Source: Chongqing Science and Technology Museum

Author: Suo Hefu, a popular science fiction writer, won the Silver Award for Novella in the China Science Fiction Nebula Award

Review experts: Huang He, Li Chunli, Chen Tao, Xu Xiaoping

Statement: Except for original content and special notes, some pictures are from the Internet. They are not for commercial purposes and are only used as popular science materials. The copyright belongs to the original authors. If there is any infringement, please contact us to delete them.