Consumers are rarely cognizant of the life-and-death struggle going on in the food industry; and nowhere is the battle more bloody than when it comes to sweetening our food. Cane sugar alone is a multi-billion-dollar, international industry. And when it comes to artificial sweeteners... we are talking major war! The lovely and graceful branches of Synsepalum dulcificum are hardly material to fashion weapons of battle. But for a while there, diabetics, dentists, the overweight, children and all of us who crave our sweets with no retribution were very close to a major improvement in lifestyle.
There are no artificial sweeteners proven absolutely safe. (Although THEY are FDA-approved.) They are used with fingers crossed. Sugar and other "natural" sweeteners are hardly to be considered as food with no ill effects. Hundreds of pounds per person are consumed yearly in more foods that we can suspect or easily detect. A teaspoonful in every tablespoonful of ketchup, for example!
Anyone with knowledge of diabetes will comprehend the power of sugar in the diet, with the dangers of this disease to include blindness, stroke, dizziness, blackouts, coma, painful neuropathy, kidney failure, amputation and death. Ask a diabetic about the difficulty of balancing—or detecting— sugar in his diet; an imbalance can prove to have disastrous results. Ask any little kid in the dentist's chair about the sugar that caused his cavities. Ask any one of us "civilized" folks who could stand to lose a few pounds about the difficulty of resisting the onslaught of advertising designed to make us eat sugar in some form or the other. Studies have shown human beings crave and need sugar from earliest infancy. We need it for growth and energy. But only up to a point—most of us, being human, overindulge; and thereby pay the price.
This berry contains the glycoprotein called Miraculin which sticks to your taste buds turning sour and bitter to sweet. The sweetening effect lasts for an hour and a half to two hours. More info: http://quisqualis.com/mirfrtdmc1a.html
This sounds like fun actually. Wonder if it would have uses for people with low appetites, or picky eaters, like the elderly or children. Latin name of the plant is Synsepalum dulcificum. I read it makes a good house plant and is quite prolific producing berries.
May 28, 2008
A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue
By PATRICK FARRELL and KASSIE BRACKEN
CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.”
Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”
They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.
The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket.
“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.
The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.
During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.
Sina Najafi, editor in chief of the art magazine Cabinet, has featured miracle fruits at some of the publication’s events. At a party in London last October, the fruit, he said, “had people testifying like some baptismal thing.”
The berries were passed out last week at a reading of “The Fruit Hunters,” a new book by Adam Leith Gollner with a chapter about miracle fruit.
Bartenders have been experimenting with the fruit as well. Don Lee, a beverage director at the East Village bar Please Don’t Tell, has been making miracle fruit cocktails on his own time, but the bar probably won’t offer them anytime soon. The fruit is highly perishable and expensive — a single berry goes for $2 or more.
Lance J. Mayhew developed a series of drink recipes with miracle fruit foams and extracts for a recent issue of the cocktail magazine Imbibe and may create others for Beaker & Flask, a restaurant opening later this year in Portland, Ore.
He cautioned that not everyone enjoys the berry’s long-lasting effects. Despite warnings, he said, one woman became irate after drinking one of his cocktails. He said, “She was, like, ‘What did you do to my mouth?’ ”
Mr. Aliquo issues his own warnings. “It will make all wine taste like Manischewitz,” he said. And already sweet foods like candy can become cloying.
He said that he had learned about miracle fruit while searching ethnobotany Web sites for foods he could make for a diabetic friend.
The party last week was his sixth “flavor tripping” event. He hopes to put on a much larger, more expensive affair in June. Although he does sell the berries on his blog, www.flavortripping.wordpress.com, Mr. Aliquo maintains that he isn’t in it for the money. (He said he made about $100 on Friday.) Rather, he said, he does it to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.”
He believes that the best way to encounter the fruit is in a group. “You need other people to benchmark the experience,” he said. At his first party, a small gathering at his apartment in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.
“You kept hearing ‘oh, oh, oh,’ ” he said, and then the guests became “literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table.”
“It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup,” he said.
Many of the guests last week found the party through a posting at www.tThrillist.com. Mr. Aliquo sent invitations to a list of contacts he has been gathering since he and a friend began organizing StreetWars, a popular urban assassination game using water guns.
One woman wanted to see Mr. Aliquo eat a berry before she tried one. “What, you don’t trust me?” he said.
She replied, “Well, I just met you.”
Another guest said, “But you met him on the Internet, so it’s safe.”
The fruits are available by special order from specialty suppliers in New York, including Baldor Specialty Foods and S. Katzman Produce. Katzman sells the berries for about $2.50 a piece, and has been offering them to chefs.
Mr. Aliquo gets his miracle fruit from Curtis Mozie, 64, a Florida grower who sells thousands of the berries each year through his Web site, www.miraclefruitman.com. (A freezer pack of 30 berries costs about $90 with overnight shipping.) Mr. Mozie, who was in New York for Mr. Gollner’s reading, stopped by the flavor-tripping party.
Mr. Mozie listed his favorite miracle fruit pairings, which included green mangoes and raw aloe. “I like oysters with some lemon juice,” he said. “Usually you just swallow them, but I just chew like it was chewing gum.”
A large group of guests reached its own consensus: limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat. Bananas were just bananas.
For all the excitement it inspires, the miracle fruit does not make much of an impression on its own. It has a mildly sweet tang, with firm pulp surrounding an edible, but bitter, seed. Mr. Aliquo said it reminded him of a less flavorful cranberry. “It’s not something I’d just want to eat,” he said.
I tried my first MF tablet about a month ago (green packaging) :S. I didn't like the acid taste that much, but the effect was off the charts!
Guess what: I bought another pack a week ago, again from www.miraclefruitworld.com (well, from one of their retailers sour2sweet), sth called Miracle Frooties. They are so much better! No acid taste in my mouth, also lasts longer. Hell, at least now I know what i put in my mouth, has all the ingredients on the box, in English!, and says ISO 9001, HACCP certified. I got 600mg, so twice the size, for almost the same price. Recomend it! And if sbd is throwing a Party with the new ones, let me know
Just wanted to share my amazing experience,… I threw the best Miracle Fruit party ever, according to my friends . Never had them before, so I was hoping the effect was going to live up to its reputation!
Since I saw there were at least 3 different kinds I ordered all: fresh berries and 2 kinds of tabs: green packaged Miracle (Mysterious) Fruit and Miracle Frooties – really nice yellow packaging. They all did the trick, though tabs were, surprisingly, more effective. Most of us preferred Miracle Frooties – especially the women, since they have 0% fat and the others don't! Also, the packaging had none of the chinese mumbo jumbo anywhere!
I bough fresh berries at www.miraclefrutman.com, green Mysterious Fruit in a local store and Miracle Frooties from www.miraclefruitworld.com, well from one of their US based retailers. I really recommend Miracle fruit to everybody (Miracle Frooties in particular). Specially loved goat cheese and dark beer! Tomatoes with goat cheese were amazing!
What are your favorites?
Sun Feb 01, 2009 8:10 am
dumby
Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 263 Location: kalifornia
i need some for the next time i ingest Calea Zacatechichi.
Infact i have been using it because i have been taking regularly a bitter medicine i really didnt like this medicine and i wanted to get into eating more healthily so i picked up a large plant from http://www.MiracleFruitHut.com, they supply berries and tablets aswell but its really great to keep yielding berries monthly i'm looking to throw some flavor tripping parties shortly also!
