What Can You Learn From the Legend of the Sweet Tooth Elves?

Directly beyond reality, a small kingdom of Elves lives with the neverending pursuit of all things sweet. Learn what happens when Uncle Jeffy Pleasant puts the village on a crash diet.

Photo by Susur He on Unsplash

A proud kingdom of Sweet Tooth Elves resides in the far corner of the Keynesian forest. The Sweet Tooth Elves aren't like your typical elf kingdom. They have never heard of Christmas, lack magical powers, and in addition to pointed ears, they all have an incredibly heightened sense of taste. In a blind taste test, Sweet Tooth Elves can accurately identify all the spices used in nearly every dish they eat.

And the Sweet Tooth Elves love their food. They pride themselves on having an extensive palate and cooking flavorful meals on par with what we humans consider Michelin-rated chefs. Beyond all other foods, the most prized flavor among Sweet Tooth Elves is sweetness. However, they have their word for sweetness, suavistre. And the best source for suavistre is suava, similar to our sugar.

The literal translation for suavistre in English is "life-power." Sweet Tooth Elves receive a share of the suava supply depending on how hard they work, who they are friends with, and how honest or conniving they are with their fellow elvesman. On the other hand, some Sweet Tooth Elves love suava so much that they dedicate their lives to accumulating and consuming suava.

These suava-obsessed elves are called bastardos. They are overweight, and most are obsessed with accumulating and hoarding as much suava as possible. The bastardos employ their fellow elves and pay them in suava. Most try to pay the lowest amount of suava their kinsmen will work. Inversely, most Sweet Tooth employees do the least work for the suava they receive.

There are outlier bastardos who share more of their suava and outlier worker-elves who happily are exploited by the bastardos. The average bastardo was about ten times larger than the ordinary Sweet Tooth Elf.

Uncle Jeffy Pleasant

Few in the kingdom know it, but Uncle Jeffy Pleasant is the most powerful elf in all the lands. Uncle Jeffy and a few of…