Sentimentality is an accusation leveled against unearned emotion. Oscar Wilde summed up the indignation: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” Artificial sweeteners grant the same intensity—sweeter than sugar itself—without the price: no tax of calories. They offer the shell of sugar without its substance; this feels miraculous and hideous at once.

This isn’t to say that sweeteners are the same as sentimentality—or even a perfect symbol for it—but simply to suggest that a similar fear is operative in these different spheres of taste. Both terms describe sweetness—emotion or taste—that feels shallow, exaggerated or undeserved, ultimately unreal. The gut reacts toward and against, seeking a vocabulary to contain excess, to name and accuse and banish it: too much sentiment, unmediated by nuance; too much sweet, undisciplined by restraint. The hunger for unmitigated and uncomplicated sensation carries on its tongue an unspoken shame. “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse,” Epicetus once said. The body is a monstrous thing that turns the soul grotesque, and that sentimental craving for a quick fix of feeling, or sudden rush of sweet, feels like the emotional equivalent of that cumbersome luggage—corporeal and base—an embarrassing set of desires that our ethereal, higher selves have to lug around. Melodrama is something to binge on: cupcakes in the closet.