glymr: Zhou Yulan sharing a lollipop with Shen Wei. Text says: sweetness. (sweetness)
glymr ([personal profile] glymr) wrote in [personal profile] branchandroot 2019-10-30 03:04 am (UTC)

You can comment on the original post, I don't bite. :)

To clarify, I never thought Shen Wei's reaction was due to the sweetness specifically (Like you, I figured it was a natural reaction to having something shoved in one's mouth!) But I did think he probably found it startlingly sweet.

However, you make some compelling points. I hadn't considered the wide availability of honey and sugar cane in Southeast Asia. Canonically, though, I think an argument can be made that neither of those would be things that young SW would have a lot of access to in a post-meteor-strike world. Or if either of them were, they would be a very rare sort of treat. It's something I think about sometimes, how different our palates must be compared to those of our ancestors, given that we eat so much sugar/corn syrup/etc compared to people even just a few hundred years ago. Not to mention the wide availability of every kind of spice and flavoring imaginable!

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