It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener -- "Sweetness #9" -- he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.
Years later, Sweetness #9 is America's most popular sweetener -- and David's family is changing. His wife is gaining weight, his son has stopped using verbs, and his daughter suffers from a generalized dissatisfaction with life. Is Sweetness #9 to blame, along with David's failure to stop it? Or are these just symptoms of the American condition?
David's search for an answer unfolds in this expansive novel that is at once a comic satire, a family story, and a profound exploration of our deepest cultural anxieties. Wickedly funny and wildly imaginative, Sweetness #9 questions whether what we eat truly makes us who we are.
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“Haunting and hilarious, Sweetness
#9 is so compelling that it made me throw the maraschino cherries in the
trash and run out to buy organic greens. That’s how sucked in I was by Stephan
Eirik Clark’s sly, bold version of our modern world, where nature and falseness
vie for supremacy and nothing can taste sweet enough, vivid enough, for
children intoxicated by the tang of chemicals. This book offers us something
amazing, with the startling ring of truth: the fact that not knowing where our
food comes from is inexorably linked to not knowing who we are.”
—
Stacey Richter, author of Twin Study