In Japanese, something sweet is amai, but that adjective is as imprecise a term as its English counterpart. In both languages, the immediate flavor from a bite of an apple as well as the slower-acting but longer-lasting taste of refined sugar are “sweet” (McGee 2004: 655). Chemists differentiate between sweeteners with high potencies (HP), such as saccharine, from carbohydrate (CHO) sweeteners like stevia. The sweet taste of stevia is more immediate than that of saccharine, but the latter lingers on the tongue longer for reasons yet to be fully understood. Saccharine can taste less sweet on the second or third sip, and various sweeteners can exhibit other tastes such as bitterness (Dubois 2016: 453–54). Sweet tastes, then, are hardly uniform, and the word “sweetness” has even wider applications when used metaphorically. In medieval Europe, sweetness was the “most mixed and trickiest of concepts,” according to...

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