Sweet Surrender

An Ode to Sweetness

Sugared flowers, Lopez Island, 2017. Copyright Mary Warner

Finding a rhythm in cultivating a creative life—which is what we are all called to do—is difficult in a world that never stops. I am old enough to remember when most things were closed on Sundays, when the stillness of a single day, free from transactions, allowed me to be more present in the world beneath my feet. Inspired by that sense of rhythm, I have decided to publish in alignment with the moon phases. It feels fitting to begin with this essay.

When I lived in Vietnam, life revolved around the moon. The new moon dictated when families would crowd the roads on scooters, making their way to cemeteries to honor their ancestors. Understanding this rhythm was the difference between venturing out or staying in. In the Hebrew Bible, honey is forbidden on the altar, yet in Vietnam, people placed their ancestors’ favorite sweets alongside paper money and flowers—offerings of remembrance and devotion.

As a woman, I grew up being called “sweet,” a word often used to shape and contain. Yet in a First Nations translation of the Bible, Jesus’s mother is called Bitter Tears. What does it mean to carry sweetness? To receive it? To crave it?

Before we begin—

What’s the first sweet you remember truly tasting? Not just eating, but noticing—the way it sat on your tongue, the memory it made. Was it store-bought or homemade? Was it offered, earned, or stolen?

Hold that memory while we explore the many meanings of sweetness. This essay is an invitation to explore your own relationship with sweetness—its presence, its absence, and the quiet places where it lingers in the corners of your heart.

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We are born hungry. Our stomachs, no larger than a marble at birth, demand constant feeding. That hunger lingers into adulthood, driving us to seek satiation in love, money, sex. The imprint of that first taste is so intimate, so primal, that, for many, it is only by placing their own child to their breast—or, failing that, by tending their ego like a newborn babe—that the hunger dissolves into love.

The first flavor we experience is sweetness. Mother's milk, though mostly water, contains enough carbohydrates—roughly 7% in the form of lactose—to begin a lifelong courtship with this basic taste. Lactose, or milk sugar, lends a soft, subtle sweetness. The craft beer industry has borrowed it to create beers with a creamy mouthfeel, a technique harnessed in a style called Pastry Beers, named for the many desserts they imitate.

My family's brewery trades intentionally in sweetness. Our Pastry Sours summon childhood summers, where sticky hands from a melting orange cream pop never touched a smartphone. Another beer we make recalls a Latvian chocolate pudding cake layered with raspberries, toasted almonds, and coconut. The brewery's co-founder, my twin's husband, Josh, got his start when his mother—a generous, go-for-it type of woman—bought him a Mr. Beer Kit. As a Floridian, she was known for her saccharine desserts. Heat and sugar go together, as we shall see, and her dinners rarely ended without something sweet. Cancer claimed her before she could witness the brewery's first production beer, but I wonder if Josh's pioneering of the Pastry Sour in Florida had something to do with a childhood steeped in sweetness.

My own childhood smelled of citrus blossoms and plumeria, honeysuckle, and crepe myrtle. These were not the flowers of the Mediterranean, but of a humble working class neighborhood in the Tampa suburbs. Our tiny lot was framed by lacy water oaks, but in the backyard, life centered around a white grapefruit tree.

The house was built in the 1960s, a part of a development called Plantation Estates. Mature citrus dotted every yard then, and winter yielded a bounty of fruit we shared with everyone we knew. White grapefruit is not as sweet as the pink variety, so after halving them, we learned to dress the fruit with brown sugar, a flavor combination I would taste again in Southeast Asia.

In Vietnam, pomelo, a distant cousin of grapefruit, is the star of a street drink combined with palm sugar, but it is something else for me. It functions as a time machine. One day, after Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New year, where several candied fruits and sweetened cakes are offered to ancestors, I am given a bouquet of white pomelo blossoms. I bend my neck to take a whiff, and with one inhale, I am a child again playing beneath the grapefruit tree in our backyard, plucking leaves, attempting to make something out of them.

I become so drunk on the perfume—the limonene and linalool, and other esters—that decades later I can not remember what I made with the grapefruit leaves. I bury my nose and I can almost taste the nectar. Sweetness intoxicates me again.

During the pandemic, I will lose my ability to smell. I will stop eating and then cooking. Without the sense I rely on to vet microorganisms I can not see or smell, a generous gift might be a poison. I worry that I will forget the memories those scents transport me to. The list is long.

The hospitality of New Orleans in jasmine and tuberose, sisterhood in spring daffodils, first love in a splash of drug store freesia body mist.

I shove various essential oils, ylang ylang, rosemary, cinnamon, and grapefruit into my nostrils. I do this every morning—a kind of weight lifting but for my nose—and after several days, it works. I smell the muted scent of grapefruit.

If I had grown up among cassia trees, would it have been the cinnamon?

"Be sweet," my father counsels me when I confide in him about my struggles with a husband crippled by deteriorating mental health. Beneath a Sugar Moon, I plead for his healing. It is springtime, and the air is fresh green and wet. I taste salt from my tears but no sweetness.

For a long time after this, I am the opposite of sweet. I am bitter. I am kale that has bolted in the summer heat, no longer edible.

But raw bitterness has wisdom. In nature, certain vegetables—especially root crops and leafy greens—undergo a transformation called cold sweetening. A survival skill. When temperatures drop below 41°F, the plants convert stored starches into sugars to nourish them through harsh winters but also to prevent their cells from freezing.

Like the vegetables, I surrender to the darkness of grief, the chill of disconnection. Cold winds blow me off course, and I am planted in dank but potent soil—perhaps more fertile than any other place I have put down roots. My life, these last seven years, has been blasted by polar gusts of forced separation, addiction, and loss.

How long will it be until I become the sweetest sugar beet?

As winter recedes, patients continue to come to me weary. Everyone is scattered. Some are angry. Most feel hopeless and uncertain. They lie awake waiting for sleep to come. They have stopped reading the news and crave sweets before bed. They ask me what can they do?

I am taking their pulse. I place my index finger just over the lateral side of the crease at the wrist and I listen before I answer. I press harder, the finger down to the bone, and there it is—a picture of a weary heart.

Be kind, I whisper. The sweetness you crave is a response to the salty flavor of life, the fear.

I offer my patients kindness and invite them to practice it, too. We are all of us starved for this sweet stuff. And yet, usually when it is offered, we hesitate, wondering if it is real or if something will be required in return.

But let me remind you, sweetness goes right to the belly. Do not settle for poor substitutes like the artificial sweeteners we use to temper bitter foods.

The people we call friends who are actually acquaintances.
The transactional relationships that yield tart fruit.
A stockpile of stuff instead of sweetness.

My husband will tell you the bitterness is gone. That we are both made softer, more desirable, with kind, sweet words. My sugar lips have been medicine to him—but also to me.

To the ancients, sweetness was always a relationship salve. King Solomon, who is credited with writing the book of Proverbs around 700 BCE tells us that, Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.

In one version of a traditional Persian wedding ceremony, a happily married woman rubs two cones of sugar together over the bride and groom's heads, an act that invites sweet blessings upon the union. In our modern world, donuts see more sugar than relationships do.

Egyptians were also using sugar on the body. As early as 1900 BCE it was used to remove hair, and more recently, it continues to be researched for its antimicrobial properties. High sugar concentrations—glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose—can inhibit bacterial growth, which is why ancient people in Mesopotamia and Egypt mixed honey with lard for wound dressings.

What if we wrapped all the suffering of the world in a crystalline ribbon of sugar, the way a master pastry chef finishes a cake?

I've seen them at work—these sugar doctors, boiling sugar into syrup, then pulling and folding, strong muscles shaping the molten strands into something beautiful. Usually, they are sweating. Sugar pulling is hard work. Being kind is, too. Anger and grief make it harder. But taste your fingers when they are still, when the sugar has cooled and hardened. Taste the sweetness you have made from your misery, lost dreams, and patience.

I think about this as I sip the Chinese herbs I have boiled and strained into a cup. Most tonic formulas have a sweet profile, and mine is no different. The taste is odd—sour at first, but softening into something subtly sweet, complex, almost like tamarind. In Chinese medicine, herbs are categorized by their targeted organs, their temperature (hot or cold), and their flavor: bitter, acrid, salty, sour, and, of course, sweet.

But this is not the syrupy sweetness of modern food. This is the sweet taste of the ancients. It is the fragrant grains like millet and rice, the tender cuts of meat, cared for and sacrificed to nourish families. Sweet herbs in a formula are used to tonify, harmonize, moisten, contain fire, and guide qi. Compared to pungent herbs like mint, which move and disperse, sweetness is gentle, nourishing.

I am tasting another century. The recipe for this formula is 400 years old, used by the Ming Dynasty doctor Zhang Jingyue, who so famously advocated for the processed root of Rehmannia (Shúdì huáng), a plant resembling foxglove, that he became known as the shúdì doctor. While there are other sweet tasting herbs in this tea, this herb is the chief, the one that will do the work of nourishing my blood and other yin nature material in my body.

Generally, the herb is judiciously dispensed, and a careful assessment of a patient's digestion will be taken before it is prescribed. My teacher, a renowned Chinese herbalist, is going over my formula with me.

She tells me that it’s too cloying, that it will be too sweet for someone like me. I sense her double meaning—during our midterm review of my clinical practice, she tells me how kind I am. During Zhang's lifetime, the herb was considered gentle and peaceful. Its reputation for being cloying was not an issue because, unlike today, sweetness wasn't everywhere. Now deemed too sweet in a sugar frosted world, bitter with anger, we need Rehmannia more than ever.

I am halfway through the Chinese sweet tea, which is more satisfying than the syrupy iced stuff I would gulp by the gallon in Mississippi, when I read this passage for my herbs research:

One ought to know that when the blood is deficient, it is like dry earth, an intense drought needing rain, withering yang desiring moisture.

The yang has been withering in me for a while. The lost babies and death of a mother-friend, the drain of endless studying, the uncertainty of if we can stay in a place that is home. And of course, the betrayal. It is hollow in my bones where the marrow should be. For so long, my heart—the organ that governs the blood—has been drained from my grief.

By the last sip, I begin to feel the shape of my heart and the marrow in my bones again.

My father cares for bees now, but he has always sought out sweetness. He planted honeysuckle and showed us how to sip nectar from its blossoms. He tried blackberries once. After the subtropical Florida heat produced more thorns than berries, he tore them out.

But there is a kind of sweetness he planted that I will never forget, something more sacred than honey or berries, and it began with a stick.

One day, he brought home a stalk of sugarcane from the grocery store. He made a bed of earth in our backyard, laid it on its side, covered it halfway with soil, and watered it daily. When it grew several feet tall, he called us over one evening. He took out his pocket knife and carved coins from the freshly cut stalk, passing them around like quarters in the Sunday collection plate.

We knew what to do from watching him. First, we nibbled. Then, ravenous for sugar—something my parents generally limited—we gnawed until only the fiber remained.

In Vietnam, while pomelo is widely available in the winter months, by summertime, locals opt for sugarcane juice. Mixed with lime, it revives both weary wanderers and those who call the land home. My husband and I seek it out one particularly sweltering day after leaving the hospital. We have just lost our baby. I am angry. My tears burn acid stains into my cheeks. My body continued to bleed, so we went for tests. There is nothing we can do. We stop for a drink because I am not ready to face a home without the dream of three of us. We order two, and the smiling, toothless man hands us plastic cups filled with a cool, chartreuse liquid.

With one sip, I am with my father again, watching his brown fingers work the stalk, his gentle movements soothing me.

By middle age, most of our bellies are soft and round. We go to the gym, hoping to return to the shape we once were and never will be again. But still, I love my belly. I grew life there twice. And now, it is the womb of my creativity. And yet, I do not feel creative these days. My mind is cloudy, my body fatigued.

While researching for a paper on dementia, I read that high sugar consumption may be linked to Alzheimer's. I carry one copy of the gene tied to it. My father tells me my mother gets confused about what day it is.

I look at the honey jar I have just refilled from the beekeeper down the street, then shove it to the back of the cupboard. They can bury me with it like the woman they found laid to rest 5,500 years ago with linden and flower honey. I can enjoy it in the afterlife. I want to remember the taste of sweetness more than I desire to taste it.

Today, sugar comes cheap. Once a luxury condiment, it was considered a fine spice, transformed into elaborate sculptures for medieval feasts. Before that, food was sweetened with honey, fruit syrups, and, especially in Asia, glutinous rice and beans.

In 350 AD, Indians refined sugar by pounding and drying it into crystals that resembled gravel. The Sanskrit word sharkara means both "sugar" and “sand,” a nod to its roots in the land. As the industry grew, a global sugar trade was built on the blood of slaves and impoverished laborers.

As I reconsider my relationship with sugar, I can not help but reflect on how something so intimately tied to comfort and memory has also shaped history—sometimes as a gift, sometimes as a weapon—and how that impacts human health.

High blood sugar, over time, damages the brain's blood vessels. Too little oxygen, and cells begin to die. Slavery might have been abolished in the West, but like persistently high blood sugar, the damage had already been done. This new story in the history of sweetness, one of empires built on people's suffering, is written into the DNA of plants whose sweetness we refine. Perhaps this is why my spirit is low after eating too much of it. After a moment of shimmering bliss, the crash comes, and with it the somber grief of so many injustices. I can sense the abuse.

We have chased sweetness across centuries, refining it, distilling it, hoarding it—only to find ourselves starved for something more nourishing. If we had been satisfied with our mother's milk—and not looked for something sweeter—might less blood be shed for it?

Without the processed stuff, my mind is clear and my heart feels full now. I still long for a piece of chocolate cake the way a child wants its stuffed toy, but this longing tells me something I had forgotten.

I want to be soothed.
I wanted to be comforted.
I want to return my mother's arms to where the sweetness began.

Thank you for spending a little time with me in contemplation of sweetness.

If you have one more moment, I’d love to hear from you: What’s the first sweet you remember truly tasting—or one that’s stayed with you?

Feel free to reply to this email or share your memory in the comments.