No, but seriously

[branchandroot]

Am I the only one bewildered by Guardian fanon that Shen Wei must never have tasted anything as concentratedly sweet as a lolipop before Zhao Yunlan introduced him? I mean, concentrated sweets are not a modern phenomenon, and straight honey is at least as intensely sweet as modern hard candy. And if we go with an assumed cultural base of the show's originating culture, well, both honey bees and sugar cane arose from Southeast Asia. Chinese desserts historically incorporate both honey and cane sugar, including straight-up hardened sugar syrup.

If anything shocked Shen Wei about that (besides the essential point of having someone shove something in his mouth) I'd expect it to be the flavoring, not the sweetness.

Comments

[branchandroot]

*waves hands* It wasn't your post in particular, so I didn't want to grumble on you! This is one that's been building on me for a while.

The amount of sugar that goes into nearly every element of the current Western diet is certainly off the curve (thank you, corn lobby), but one thing you can count on pretty much every culinary culture, at every stage of development, to have discovered is the local sources of sweet. If you're far enough north/south, it may be a seasonal food, but it's only when you get into /serious/ subsistence-level ecologies that it's all that rare.

*reins her foodways enthusiasm in* Anyway! What I'd absolutely buy Shen Wei being startled by, tastewise, is the... let's call it the /sharpness/ of the sweetness in a modern hard-candy. The flavorings used to mimic 'fruit' are often pretty acidic, and that would be quite different from the richer sweetness of honey or actual fruit or fruit preserves.