This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription—insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself—and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. As Wilde said: the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It’s a kind of Horatio Alger–bootstrap ethos in our aesthetic economy: you need to earn your reactions to art, not simply collect easy sentiment handed out like welfare.