How Do Chemicals Interact With Light?

Artificial sweeteners exploit the fact that despite being a sugar and they do interact with your tongue in a way that you can taste them. Our bodies can't actually take them apart to use the energy so we can't metabolize them even though we can taste them because they have the wrong chirality. This was discovered by Louis Pasteur himself more than 150 years ago he synthesized a bunch of chemicals and then he also distilled them from life.