It is just simply not a time when sweetness-in the beloved and nourishing interpersonal, visionary, and culinary forms captured in this issue-is being given its due. The importance of crafting this issue at this time into a message of broad societal relevance is, therefore, plain. In the way of the inter-discipline of ethnobiology, what follows is a frame we hope is capable of displaying the enduring pricelessness of biocultural diversity today, in this case, drawing on the lovely, tender, fulfilling, and pervasive nature of sweetness.Our main conceptual approach is to situate sweetness within what has been described as the reading-off hypothesis (Barry 2007). Argued consistently to be the most fundamental human-nature conceptual channel, the reading-off hypothesis describes a conviction that thorough examination of the natural world brings worthy prescriptions for human flourishing and goodness. In its firmest form, it places nature as an authority for social norms (Smith 1996). First Nation Canadian Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows (Borrows 2013) describes it like this:If you see a bird and the way that that bird takes care of its young, and you recognize that there is something in that interaction that you should be taking into your life, you would find