- © Cynthia Furey – http://www.fureyandthefeast.com
I’ve got a question for you… Can you eat this wedge of lime without wincing?
Most people can’t, but it is possible! Just eat the small red berry, called miracle fruit, before the lime. This little berry, named Synsapalum dulcificum by experts, makes all sour, bitter and spicy foods taste sweet! Limes taste like they’ve been candied, cheese tastes like buttercream icing, a pint of Guinness tastes like chocolate, and even hot sauce tastes like honey barbecue sauce. This may sound like something from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it’s true!
The berry itself doesn’t taste of anything, yet its effects last for up to an hour. So how does it make all these foods taste sweet?
It works like this. Your tongue is covered in many tiny extensions called papillae. Each papilla contains a taste bud, and each taste bud has up to a hundred receptors inside it, which are all specific to each of the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (the Japanese word for ‘savoury’ or ‘meaty’). Normally, when you eat a wedge of lime this activates the sour and bitter receptors, which your brain registers as eating something unpleasant and you can’t help but pull a face! But when you chew the berry, it releases a protein called miraculin that changes the shape of the sweet receptors so that they become sensitive to acidic foods, tricking your brain into thinking that they are sweet.
Miracle fruit has been used for centuries, probably even millennia. It was first documented way back in the early 1700s by French explorer Chevalier des Marchais, who saw it being used by natives in West Africa. So why is it getting so much attention now?
Well, cancer researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Centre in Florida have started investigating miraculin as a potential chemotherapy aid. One of the side effects of chemotherapy is a long-lasting metallic taste in the mouth. This has a detrimental effect on patients’ responses to treatment because it makes eating food repulsive and so the patients soon become underweight and malnourished. The researchers are currently running a clinical trial, as they believe that miraculin could restore patients’ appetites and allow them to have the best chances of making a full recovery.
With this, people also saw the fun side to the berry and began holding ‘flavour tripping’ parties, where guests pay a small amount of money to experience the new flavours at a buffet stacked with different fruits, cheeses, pickles, drinks and sauces. These parties are still very much underground – even in the United States where they are slowly gaining popularity – so it can be difficult to find a local flavour tripping experience.
Nonetheless, you can still make some easy earnings, in true party style, by slipping a berry in your mouth and betting your friends that you CAN eat that wedge of lime without wincing!
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Links:
http://www.miraclefruit.co.uk/
http://www.miracleberry.co.uk/
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