Bruce Goodner's List: Test-Miracle Fruit

Miracle Fruits (sometimes called Miracle Berries) have been a secret wonder of the world for centuries. Though they were first documented by a French dude in 1725, they'd been consumed for many generations prior. They were eaten before meals to make the meals taste better. "How?" you ask. By making sour and bitter foods taste sweet. "But how?" you scream. The truth is, science doesn't completely know (it has something to do with the protein miraculin that bonds to your taste buds, but the exact cause is still a mystery). But the berries work, and it's a miracle.

The Miracle Fruit plant (Synsepalum dulcificum) produces berries that, when eaten, cause sour foods (such as lemons and limes) consumed later to taste sweet. The berry, also known as Miracle Berry, Magic Berry, Miraculous Berry or Flavour Berry,^[2][3] was first documented by explorer Chevalier des Marchais^[4] who searched for many different fruits during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa. Marchais noticed that local tribes picked the berry from shrubs and chewed it before meals. The plant grows in bushes up to 20 feet (6.1 m) high in its native habitat, but does not usually grow higher than ten feet in cultivation, and it produces two crops per year, after the end of the rainy season. It is an evergreen plant that produces small red berries, with flowers that are white and which are produced for many months of the year. The seeds are about the size of coffee beans.

 

The berry contains an active glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin.^[5][6] When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. While the exact cause for this change is unknown, one hypothesis is that the effect may be caused if miraculin works by distorting the shape of sweetness receptors "so that they become responsive to acids, instead of sugar and other sweet things".^[3] This effect lasts between thirty minutes and two hours.

Miracle fruit is available as freeze dried granules or in tablets - this form has a longer shelf life than fresh fruit. Tablets are made from compressed freeze dried fruit which causes the texture to be clearly visible even in tablet form.

 

The effect of Miracle fruit is made possible by contact with the tongue, not through digestion. For this reason, tablets must be allowed to dissolve in the mouth. The most pronounced effect can be achieved by coating the entire tongue in a paste of Miracle fruit for up to 30 seconds.

 

The tablets are currently very difficult to get outside of Asia, where they are popular among diabetics and dieters.^[5][6] However, in many countries they can be purchased on the Internet.