The Sweetest Thing

“What is the sweetest thing in the world?” After co-host Latif Nasser’s sons ask him this deceptively simple question, he goes on a quest to find it. Is it a West African Katemfe berry? Or an industrial sugar substitute cooked up in a lab? Or an ingredient hiding in plain sight in all of our pantries? A simple mystery that will make you question what sweetness even is, how our tongues (and other body parts you wouldn’t expect) determine what we like, and how far you would go to taste something sweeter than anyone has ever experienced.

Thank you to Latif’s sons for indulging us, to Nicola Twilley and Cynthia Graber at Gastropod, to Anni Laffitte, Nazli Parvizi at Museum of Food and Drink, to food icons Claire Saffitz and Sam Seneveratne who did a live show version of this episode with us at the Tribeca Festival. And thank you to Davy Gardner and his wonderful team of audio folks at the Tribeca Festival.

Thank you to Jialin Deng who composed the song that was our ‘sonic seasoning’. And to Laura Rickman and everyone else at Columbia University’s Mortimer B Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute for hosting us.

And big thanks to experimental psychologist Charles Spence at Oxford, sweetness chemist Grant DuBois, Danielle Reed at Monell Chemical Senses Center, and nutritional scientist Sarah Berry at King’s College London who all talked to us about their research. And Brian Everett of Honest Organic Farms.

And a very special thanks to Sean Oomens, inventor of producer Jess Yung’s favorite candy, nerd gummy clusters

EPISODE CREDITS:

Reported by - Latif Nasser

with help from - Jessica Yung, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Jessica Yung, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Natalia Ramirez

Produced by - Jessica Yung

with help from -  Mona Madgavkar, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Gabby Santas, and Maia Appleby Melamed

with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom

Fact-checking by - Sophie Samiee