What efforts have people made in pursuit of "sweetness"?

Among the five flavors of sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and salty, sweet is the most special.

Biologists have found that sweetness is the first taste that humans accept and pursue after birth. It is the taste that everyone is closest to at birth - the closest to the touch of breast milk. In terms of the composition of breast milk, the most abundant is not protein and fat, but carbohydrate - lactose. Lactose in human milk is the main source of heat energy for infants within 6 months after birth. If you give a baby some sweet water when he cries, the baby's heartbeat will slow down and his expression will become more and more relaxed.

Further research has shown that sweetness can bring happiness and relieve pain. Sweetness is the most basic form of deliciousness, which can make people feel happy in itself. Experiments conducted by neuroscientists have proved that sweetness triggers the production of pleasure chemicals in the brain.

Why are the first few years of life so sweet?

In addition to the fact that infants and young children do not need to consider their body size, there is a more basic background, that is, sweet food - whether it is starch or sugar - is the easiest material for the body to convert into energy. If it is protein or fiber, it takes several steps to turn it into glucose in the blood.

In terms of energy, sweetness is the most direct guarantee of calories; but in terms of taste, sweetness is often a slow and long rhythm. For example, the spiciness that dominates the world today is actually a shortcut to oral stimulation. It is not even a taste, but a feeling similar to touch. Spiciness is a burning pain caused by capsaicin directly stimulating the oral mucosa and trigeminal nerve, which is fundamentally different from sweetness that relies purely on taste buds to convert stimulation signals. Sweetness is a slow feeling. For example, the first sweetness that some people tasted came from the most basic staple food in East Asia - rice.

Humans are experts at recognizing sweetness. Archaeologists have discovered that humans began to consume honey as early as 12,000 years ago. Around 6000 BC, sugarcane juice was squeezed and solid sugar was made after distillation, purification, and drying. Around 1000 AD, Indian tribes in Central and South America began to consume stevia leaves and made stevia tea. Stevia is 200 to 300 times sweeter than sucrose.

Although sweetness has always delighted human taste buds, it has told different cultural stories over the course of history.

Honey is considered a "gift from heaven"

For a long time, honey was the only natural sweetener known to mankind. In ancient memory, humans began to eat honey as soon as they appeared and believed that it was a sacred sweetness. In the Bible's "Exodus", God promised the Israelites a land that was beautiful, broad, and flowing with milk and honey.

The ancient Egyptians used honey as a preservative, as food and medicine, and fed it to sacred animals. Honey was also often used in various religious ceremonies. The ancient Egyptian civilization considered honey very precious, and once made it a currency. People who had a lot of honey were considered very rich. Bees were also once a symbol of the pharaoh. There are also records of eating honey in the history of Israel, China and India. In the Roman Empire, the first monograph on honey production and beekeeping appeared. The nobility of honey is partly related to the sweetness that makes people happy.

Most of the honey consumed by humans came from wild beehives. The earliest record of humans collecting wild honey appeared in cave paintings in Bicorp, Spain, which depicted two people climbing a straw ladder to collect beehives on a cliff. These rock paintings were created around thousands of years BC.

The discovery of a wild beehive was initially accidental, but people soon realized that although the bees were constantly flying from flower to flower, they always flew straight back to the hive laden with pollen, and so the word "beeline" was born.

By following the bees, honey hunters always find hives. In colonial America, honey hunters lived alone in the wilderness in search of wild hives. Once they found a hive, they cut down the entire tree and put the hives in buckets. It was a dangerous and lonely job, but the demand for honey made it indispensable. Honey hunters have existed for a long time in history when domesticated bee colonies were not common. In many Indian tribes, there are many special laws regarding honey, such as the death penalty for stealing honey from someone else's home.

Honey is very easy to eat, it does not need to be heated to boiling or frozen. Honey is also considered to be magical, a gift from heaven, and the food of God.