Dennett and sugar taste

I have been re-reading Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon due to having scheduled a book club meeting, and I came across an idea that caught my eye:

Coevolution endorsed the bargain between plant and animal, sharpening our ancestors’ capacity to discriminate sugar by its “sweetness.” That is, evolution provided animals with specific receptor molecules that respond to the concentration of high-energy sugars in anything they taste, and hard-wired those receptor molecules to the seeking machinery, to put is crudely. People generally say that we like some things because they are sweet, but this really puts it backward: it is more accurate to say that some things are sweet (to us) because we like them! … There is nothing “intrinsically sweet” (whatever that would mean) about sugar molecules. (pp. 59)

So sugar molecules aren’t sweet, we just interpret them as being sweet. Rather, sugar molecules are valuable forms of energy, and we’ve evolved to prefer valuable sources of energy, so now sugar molecules make our brainmeat go, “Yum! Eat that!”

Now, of course, this powerful instinct is working against us, given that food is so plentiful.