ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how sugar as chemical substance and sweetness as relational experience are intimately, and at times uneasily, linked in the lives and lounge-rooms of our participants. Tracing the historical development of nutritional science from its moral Christian beginnings, Coveney reveals how foods that impart flavour and pleasure have been restricted in dietary discourse. Families thereby reclaim the meanings of sugar beyond a nutritional discourse of 'dietary sugar' and 'sweetness' permeates everyday language as people are described as 'sweetie' or 'honey', things are 'sweet' and circumstances become palatable. As such, the author's view sweetness as a practice of care. 'Subversive' eating is not only a central impetus in children's taste for sugar but is sustained into adulthood, with a sense of 'naughtiness' around the consumption of sweet foods that is promoted in the marketing of ready-made sugary products.
