Miracle berry food experiment report

[lethargic_man]

I mentioned a little while ago that I was thinking of trying miracle berries, for the novelty of the experience. These contain a substance which binds at a molecular level to sour-tasting molecules but itself binds to sweet-flavour receptors on the tongue, thus converting sour flavours into sweet.

It turned out (perhaps not surprisingly) that you can't just go down to the greengrocers and pick some of these berries up: they're too delicate. If you want fresh berries, you can order them on the Internet, and they will be sent to you packed in dry ice. This costs quite a lot, and they don't last very long, so I didn't do that. Alternatively, you can get a powder made from the berries. This costs less, but still quite a lot, and lasts longer, but still not very long, so I didn't do that either.

Alternatively, you can buy pills made from the berry. These cost £13 for a pack of ten (the site I bought them from described the berry as the most expensive fruit in the world!), and last up to eighteen months. I wasn't very happy at the idea of buying dodgy pills off an Internet site, so I read around quite a bit before I went ahead with doing so. There are a number of sites selling miracle berry pills, and pretty much all of them have a FAQ featuring the question "Is it safe?"... and every site bar one said yes it is. That one exception (I can't now remember which it is, and have got better things to do than try and find it again) said something like, "No, it is not safe; we are selling you these pills as an example to show you what they look like"―obviously covering their own tracks in case they get sued. What made this ridiculous is that they even provided a recipe to use with miracle berries, but then told you in the "Is it safe?" FAQ not to use it!

Anyhow, in the end I ordered pills from mberry, and tried them out with aviva_m. One doesn't swallow the tablet; because it acts on one's tongue, instead you let it dissolve on your tongue until it's completely gone.

The Net of a Million Lies suggested some foods to try out with miracle berries: lemons, beer, grapefruit juice, dill pickles (and their brine), Tabasco sauce/chilli peppers, strawberries and vinegar. We tried out most of these, and indeed most of them did taste sweeter as a result. The food left a strange sweet taste in the mouth afterwards, aviva_m said it tasted artificial. I concur: it reminded me more of the taste of artificial sweeteners than pure sugar; but this aftertaste wasn't much present when food was actually in our mouths, and didn't detract from the food's taste.

I'd been wondering whether the miraculin would be enough to saturated the sour receptors on the tongue, i.e. would the sour taste be completely replaced with sweetness? The answer was no: you could still taste sourness, but it was outweighed by sweetness, in the same way that the sugar in lemon meringue pie or lemon and lime marmalade offsets the sourness of the lemon.

We didn't have lemons, since we had limes in the house to finish up, and we tried those first, and they were interesting. Then we tried grapefruit, and that was the big success for me. I don't like grapefruit, it's too sour for me, but the miracle berry suddenly turned it into something I really liked, and I chomped my way enthusiastically through most of the grapefruit. (I hadn't gone overboard on the limes, as the Web warned that though miracle berries make acidic fruit sweet, they don't make them any less acidic, and you can get indigestion if you go and guzzle several whole lemons.)

Beer was disappointing. Neither aviva_m nor I like beer, so we were hoping this would create a new sensation for us. In actuality, the Carlsberg (IIRC) I bought tasted completely unchanged. The same applied to cheese (except that I was the only one of the two of us not liking it).

Strawberries were also a little disappointing: People on the Web had written "this is how strawberries should always taste." For me, whilst they did taste a bit sweeter, strawberries are naturally sweet, and I don't feel they need additional sweetening. I wonder whether my reaction might be influenced by the fact that (not uncommonly, I believe) as I've grown older, I've found my taste widening to less and less sweet things. Indeed, I think I actually find strawberries sweeter than I used to, though it's possible that this is because (as with pineapple) there's a new, sweeter variety sold nowadays that didn't exist when I was growing up. At any rate, I was raised dipping strawberries in sugar when I ate them, and find such additional sweetening completely unnecessary nowadays.

Dill pickles I fluffed slightly, as I accidentally bought an already sweetened version. (Being in Germany at the time, the dill pickles sold in the supermarket didn't always quite match up, either by name or contents, with what I'm used to in the UK.) Tabasco sauce I also found not particularly enhanced; and vinegar I didn't get a chance to try: Malt vinegar is unknown in Germany (only the British and the Swedes consume it in Europe, apparently, and whilst you can get it in shops serving British ex-pats, they're not open late on a Saturday evening), and kosher wine vinegar is also not something I could buy from the local supermarket on a Saturday evening. So I'll try vinegar under the influence of miraculin at home some time when I'm having fish and chips. :o)

All in all, then, miracle berries were an interesting experiment to try, but not really something I'd rave over, except for what it did for grapefruit. If anyone wants to join me in trying the foodstuffs I haven't already tried out under their influence―or take some of the unused tablets off my hands―do please drop a comment here. Otherwise I'll probably finish off the rest of the tablets on grapefruit or grapefruit juice over the course of the year. :o)

Comments

[liv]

I'm really glad you got try the miracle berry chemical! Thanks for this write-up.

[lethargic_man]

Have you tried it?

[jack]

Thank you for writing about it, I'm really interested to know what it was actually like, and that it was fairly easy to get hold of. I might try it (though I probably won't get round to it), I like the idea.

[curious_reader]

Do you still have them? I saw it on bbc. They used real berries and tried a lemon. Apparently it really tasted sweet. I am allergic to citrus as well as lots of other fruit in fresh form. I could not try that. If you still have these berries we would try other things. I don't like beet root, vinegar, chilly and anything pickled. That might be worse trying. I am also not keen on raspberries I can actually eat because they usually have no taste when I buy them. We could also try fresh cranberries and red currents. They are usually very sour and need sugar to be edible.

[lethargic_man]

Oh, finally someone who has heard of them! Do you want to come for Shabbos lunch this week, since you're in London, and we can try them out then. I'll provide the miracle berries, you provide the cranberries, red currants, pickled dill maybe, and anything else you want to try.