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Magicberry-do a magic job

My friend Wan Pha-shafien has created an online stir with his post about the wonders of the Miracle Fruit.

It's a small, red berry from West Africa with a strange and wonderful property: It makes sour things taste sweet.

I tried one over the weekend, from the same batch Wan pha tried. You put the thing in your mouth, chew it, and slosh it around so it coats your tongue. I then bit into two lemon wedges, and ate them both. I chewed them like candy. They tasted like sweet lemonade.

The secret is a glycoprotein called Miraculin (yes, that's actually what it's called) that attaches itself to your taste buds. No one seems to be quite sure how it turns sour and bitter to sweet. The effect lasts for about 90 to 120 minutes.

The fruit is heavily marketed in Japan, where it's used in fruit form, in powder form, and now that scientists have figured out a way to isolate Miraculin, in tablets. Some chefs there have constructed low-cal deserts around the use of the fruit. Wired News reported last December that there's even Miraculin-infused lettuce in the works.

In Japan, the Miracule Fruit is particularly popular among diabetics and dieters. Those are two very large (sorry) and growing markets in the U.S. It's also used to help leukemia patients get back their appetites, and to make bitter medicine more palatable. All this would seem to mean a great market for the stuff in America. So why can't Malaysian consumers get any?

It seems that the FDA banned the fruit under mysterious circumstances in the 1970s. I've seen speculation on various websites that it may have had something to do with the sugar industry, or with the fact that aspartame was working its way to FDA approval at about the same time. There's been little written about why the fruit was banned, only that the prohibition appears to have been sudden and unexpected. It came on the eve of one company's plan to roll out a major marketing campaign.
The Miracle Fruit has been used for centuries, now. And there have been quite a few studies of it, with no known ill-effects, other I guess than that it could potentially cause something toxic to taste better than it should. That hardly seems like a reason to ban it.

Seems like something the FDA ought to revisit, particularly with the up tick in diabetes cases over the last several years.

Miracle Fruit
Synsepalum dulcificum
a.k.a. Miracle Berry
A relatively tasteless berry with an amazing side-effect. After eating one miracle fruit, sour things will instantly taste sweet. Eating even the sourest of lemons, one will taste only sugary sweetness. The effect lasts an hour or two. The miracle fruit is a remarkable natural sweetener that is virtually unknown to much of the world.

Berries are eaten fresh. Africans sometimes use the fruits to improve the taste of stale food. Fruits are being investigated as a possible source for a natural food sweetener.

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General information and cultivation

General information and cultivation

The plant grows best at a pH as low as 4.5 to 5.8, in an environment free from frost and in partial shade with high humidity. The miracle fruit grows well with blueberries. Without the use of plant hormones the seeds have a 24% sprouting success rate.^{[citation needed]} The plants take between eight and ten years to bear fruit, but treatments for commercial crops can reduce gestation to less than four years.^{[citation needed]}

The Miracle Fruits plant

The Miracle Fruit Plant, sometimes known as Miraculous Berry, (Sideroxylon dulcificum/Synsepalum dulcificum) is a plant first documented by an explorer named Des Marchais 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 high in its native habitat, but does not usually grow higher than five 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.