ech (06/08/82)
A general discussion of this issue may be found in Martin Gardner's "The Ambidextrous Universe," with the usual nice bibliography. In general your body does treat right- and left-handed (dextro- and levo-) compounds differently - right-handed amino acids cannot be metabolized at all, for example - but that includes taste. The name escapes me at the moment, but I seem to recall that lemons and limes have the same characteristic flavor molecule, except that one is levo, the other dextro. I'd be quite surprised to learn of a sucrose equivalent which tasted the same but was otherwise unmetabolized... =Ned Horvath=