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Article: Sweet Polychrest.(sugar)
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- March 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Unlike our personal inclinations toward salt, sour, bitter, pungent ("hot") and all the other tastes, among human beings the near-universal liking for the taste of sweetness is probably tied to a built-in biological predisposition. A wide variety of substances in nature, including some that need to be extracted or processed, serve to satisfy that longing. The sugar maple, the sugar beet, the Chinese cane (Sorghum saccharatum), the palmyra and toddy palms, and dozens of fruits and vegetables, including the intensely sweet date and fig, are only some of the best-known sources; during the past century, those sources have multiplied.
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