I am playing a “Mad Botanist” in the Spirit of the Century game at International House of Johnson. So, since I had some Miracle Fruit tablets hanging around, waiting for me to try them, I decided I would bring them to Game Night Certainly “flavor tripping” ranks fairly high on the mad science scale.
Miracle fruit is a small bland red berry that is incredibly perishable and therefore hardly ever seen around here. It contains a chemical aptly named “miraculin” that, when eaten, alters taste perceptions (for about a half hour), making anything sour seem sweet. Since the berry is so perishable and unavailable, I bought tablets of freeze-dried fruit instead. Available at your friendly neighborhood ThinkGeek.com
I searched the internet for some sour foods other people had enjoyed with the berry, and came up with this list: lemons, limes, grapefruit, sour cream, and hot sauce. Kris added apple cider vinegar to the list. To up the mad science quotient, I displayed the cut fruits in my “Radioactive” plastic food containers. (Playing a mad plant scientist wasn’t that far a stretch.)
Miracle Fruit & etc.
Laura, Gunnar and I each ate a chunk of lemon as the control, then began letting a miracle fruit tablet dissolve in our mouth. The miracle fruit tablet wasn’t that great, but you had to hold it in your mouth and allow it to dissolve completely, and covering as much of your tongue (taste buds) as possible, to get the maximum result. Gunnar pointed out that they tasted a bit like haw flakes (and I agree. It also left a little lingering sweet sensation, like stevia.). Laura was the first to finish her tablet, and took a chunk of lemon. To her (and my) delight, it was now as sweet as an orange – just as advertised!
We stood around eating lemons and grapefruit (the lime was not as popular, though I found it ok; the lemon was better to me, and the grapefruit was better to Laura). Kris and Gus both joined in at this point. I opened the sour cream. A spoonful of sour cream tasted like cream cheese – so then we ate some sour cream, along with the fruit, which was a great dessert combination. Gunnar broke out the vinegar, which was somewhat mild, but still not extremely pleasant. I tried the hot sauce, but didn’t notice any obvious flavor difference.
Dave wouldn’t try the tablet, due to the mysterious Chinese packaging – not even when I pointed out to him that the label reassuringly said “no known adverse side effects“. No I was not cackling maniacally at the time, either, I might add. Your loss, Dave!
The flavor alteration did last about a half an hour, I think. It was best if you put the food in the same area of your tongue that had held the berry the longest (the front of the tongue, more or less). By the time the spoonful of vinegar, etc. got to the back of the palate it returned to being unaltered and astringent.
All in all it was very fun! Some of the online reports I read of people ravaging through cupboards to test random things and decreeing that the miracle berry had changed their life… well it was nothing like that, but it was fun, hey!
I definitely plan to do it again. I read somewhere that in Japan someone had added a gene to lettuce so that lettuce would express miraculin (actually that’s in the wikipedia article if you read it). So maybe when that hits the market…
After all of that we had cupcakes, candy Dave brought back from the UK, and went on to encounter some Samurai warriors in 192- New York. It was, all in all, a very good evening. (Not counting the injuries sustained by Someone who was attempting to bound from the tops of train car to train car, on a moving train, without having taken any points in athletics.)
