Rhubarb, anyone?
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Miracle fruit makes everything taste sweet
The Wall Street Journal
ARLINGTON, Va.At a party here one recent Friday, Jacob Grier stood on a chair, pulled out a plastic bag full of small berries, and invited everyone to eat one apiece. "Make sure it coats your tongue," he said.
Grier's guests were about to go under the influence of miracle fruit, a slightly tart West African berry with a strange property: For about an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes sweet.
Within minutes of consuming the berries, guests were devouring lime wedges as if they were candy. Straight lemon juice went down like lemonade, and goat cheese tasted as if it were "covered in powdered sugar," said one astonished partygoer. A rich stout beer seemed "like a milkshake," said another.
After languishing in obscurity since the 1970s, miracle fruit, or Synsepalum dulcificum, is enjoying a small renaissance.
In-the-know food lovers from Hawaii to Finland are seeking out the berry as a culinary curiosity.
Growers like Curtis Mozie of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., are racing to keep up with the recent demand.
The 63-year-old retired postman has cultivated the slow-growing shrub for a decade, and now says he has hundreds of them at a nursery near his home.
Most of the small number of U.S. growers sell cuttings or seeds for chefs or other aficionados to grow their own plants, rather than shipping the highly perishable berries. After a food lovers' blog called EatFoo, to which Grier contributes, began spreading word in February about Mozie's product, he raised his prices to $1.80 from $1 per fruit. He ships them overnight, because the red berry -- about the size of a grape with a large pit -- turns brown and unappetizing within a day or so after it's picked.
Miracle discovery
Scientists say a Protein in the fruit works by binding to taste buds and altering the tongue's so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour foods are eaten.
In 1852, a British surgeon described the fruit in a pharmaceutical journal as a "miraculous" berry.
In the early 20th century, a renowned botanist for the Agriculture Department, David Fairchild, was the first person to bring miracle fruit from Africa to the U.S., says Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida.
Lloyd Beidler, a biology professor at Florida State University, and a colleague isolated the active protein in the berry in 1968, which Dutch researchers doing similar work dubbed "miraculin."
Around the same time, Bartoshuk was doing research on the berry for the U.S. Army, which never went as far as adding it to rations.
Several miracle-fruit growers in Florida say cancer patients occasionally seek out the fruit because it reportedly alleviates a metallic taste in the mouth that is one side effect of chemotherapy. There is no scientific research supporting the claim.
A strange experience
Miracle fruit remains in a kind of regulatory limbo in the U.S. It's perfectly fine to grow and sell it, because the Food and Drug Administration doesn't require prior approval to sell fresh fruits, though it can intercede if it suspects problems.
At the Arlington party hosted by Grier, a barista at a Georgetown bakery and coffeehouse, guests milled around a table covered with a wide assortment of tart and sour foods -- lemons, limes, grapefruits, pomelos, rhubarb, dill pickles, cheeses and sour candy.
"Rhubarb is the big winner, it's like a sugar stick," said Lalitha Chandrasekhar, a 22-year-old researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
Paul Sherman, 27, who works at a nonprofit group that studies campaign finance, followed his miracle fruit with strawberries and found them "like strawberry-flavored candy ... almost too sweet."
It was, he concluded, "the strangest gustatory experience I have ever had in my life."
MIRACLE FRUIT FACTS
Scientists say a protein in the fruit works by binding to taste buds and altering the tongue's so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour foods are eaten.
In the early 20th century, a renowned botanist for the Agriculture Department, David Fairchild, was the first person to bring miracle fruit from Africa to the U.S., says Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida.
Lloyd Beidler, a biology professor at Florida State University, and a colleague isolated the active protein in the berry in 1968, which Dutch researchers doing similar work dubbed "miraculin."
It's perfectly fine to grow and sell miracle fruit because the Food and Drug Administration doesn't require prior approval to sell fresh fruits, though it can intercede if it suspects problems.
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal