The Incidental Sweetness of American Life

A French Perspective

The marvelous anthropological expression that titles this article I owe to Adam Gopnik, who uses it in his book Through the Children's Gate, the story of his family's move back home to New York after years of living in Paris. Everybody, and especially the kids, found so many things in America too sweet. It's true, the French have a much lower tolerance for sweetness than most other peoples. Like saltiness, bitterness, sourness, and what some taste physiologists describe as umami (savoriness), sweetness is a broad taste sensation that obscures more particular and subtler tastes (and we French try to be all about the subtlety).

Dessert in France is much likelier to be cheese or fruit than pastry (saving room for a final chocolate square or some bite-sized cookies and the like, called petits fours), the point being to clear the palate—or the table, if we follow the derivation from the Old French, desservir. At any rate, the idea never was to drown the taste buds in sweetness and fat. Actually, before the nineteenth century, when sugar became cheap and widely available, truly sweet desserts as most Americans now recognize them would have been strictly for the rich or else a special occasion or holiday treat, not an everyday thing. Unfortunately, America's problem (and to be fair, it's not just America's problem) of incidental sweetness is not limited to sweets, or even sugar. High-fructose corn syrup makes its way into everything from soft drinks to tomato sauces to supermarket yogurt to fast-food french fries, offering calories but not instant energy that most cells in the body can use. (Glucose, not fructose, is what your cells need.) So the energy tends to be stored as you know what. After trans fats, corn syrup is probably the most offensive fattening ingredient in processed foods. And Americans consume on average forty-five pounds of corn syrup a year! (En passant, I should say that most fruit juices, high in naturally occurring fructose, are dangerously fattening for the same reason; the body can't easily use the sugar. So my advice is eat, don't drink, your fruit.) But back to your morning cup of coffee. A teaspoon of sugar once or twice a day is a reasonable indulgence that won't make anyone fat, but lots of people are conditioned to add several to each cup, as well as to having several cups a day—not a good idea in any case. Once our taste—whether for sweetness, fat, salt—is recalibrated over time, an excess that used to taste good comes to taste awful.

It's Not About Deception

Edward always took his coffee with a teaspoon or two. That's how he was raised. One day when he was about to put a heaping teaspoon of sugar into his cup, I asked him if he could drink his coffee without sugar. He looked at me and asked, "Would you eat french fries without ketchup?" (I said, "Yes, I do.") He had never even thought about it. Some days later, I suggested he cut the sugar in half and try it. He saw it as a challenge. He did, and enjoyed the coffee just the same. Within a few months, he had cut the half in half, and for the past ten or fifteen years he has taken his morning coffee (his only coffee of the day) with no sugar but plenty of pleasure. Deploying the 50 Percent Solution is an effective way to reduce these calories while helping you build up a greater sensitivity to sweetness. (Sugar substitutes, by contrast, while not fattening, only preserve our preternatural taste for the sweet—they are therefore an un-useful self-deception.) Eventually you will find the taste of added sugar cloying. You may discover that you actually like the true flavor of coffee.

I have a theory about how we originally came to sweeten our coffee, which the French generally don't do. When I came to America, the coffee was simply awful: poorly made, often from inferior blends, over-roasted beans, stale grounds. It was burned in percolation and reburned in keeping it warm all day. (Freshly brewed coffee holds its peak flavor for about twenty minutes.) So the standard was a bitter pill, strong and caffeine-infused. You needed to add sugar to get it down. Nowadays—thanks to all sorts of beans; better roasting and preservation techniques; and grinders, pods, drip filter coffeemakers, and pressure gadgets; and especially to Starbucks and other such chains—excellent coffee is an affordable luxury. Who would have thought that people would be willing to pay more for quality? I'm sure that idea sounded pretty wacky when first uttered in the elevator.