Stevia Experiments
In the summer of 2004, I was working for as a sales assistant for a managed services software company. It’d take me two buses to get to work, which was on the second floor of a sprawling low rise business park. My role wasn’t clearly defined but I tried to figure out different ways to be useful.
It was also I time I started to experiment with sweeteners. I knew sugar was bad… I had picked up a book about how sugar was poison and started to look at how sugar was everywhere. Before that, I had been a fiend of Coke. I loved Cola and could easily go through a 2L bottle in a day. I had switched already to Diet Coke but also felt that Acesulfame K and Aspartame probably weren’t the best choices. I had a bias towards things that were “natural”.
That’s when my sniffing around a local healthfood store turned up stevia. At the time, there was a crystallized stevia powder as well as whole dried leaf. Information on stevia was limited and while some Internet findings pointed to the fact that it reduced insulin response and was calorie free, others mentioned tribal use as a male contraceptive drug. I felt it was worth the risk for calorie free sweetness.
Many mornings, I’d lik up a used gallon jug with unsweetened Kool Aid, vitamin C powder, and a few tablespoons of the stevia crystals. I’d sip it through out the day and it’d break up the monotony of the work.
Over time, I became a fan of the new stevia brands that would come out. Truvia, Stevia In The Raw, and others. That summer helped me develop a palette for different aspects of sweetness, after tastes, and other senses that could affect the sense of sweet. For example, adding cut up fruit, like orange slices, had a profound effect on the senses.
Since then, new “natural” sweeteners have come up and stevioside has been much better refined to remove bitterness. Erythritol, monk fruit extract, and allulose have come to market and have been packetized. Stevia has become more mainstream, being adopting by the keto community, and even having a version used in Coke!
One of the anachronisms in Breaking Bad was a scene where a stevia pack was used for nefarious means. Stevia packets weren’t widely available in 2008 and it’s a near 0% chance they’d be found in a diner. What’s not anachronistic was the protagonist’s attitude towards stevia, in calling it “that stevia s*&^!” — that was generally the attitude towards stevia in 2008 and 2009.
There’s still a lot of development on sweeteners ahead of us. Recently, companies like Resugar and Amai launched new sweetening proteins and there are dozens of other companies at the precipice of new additives that will make our food sweeter and tastier.
The future is delicious!
