A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I gathered some friends together to squelch our mutual curiosity for a tiny, scarlet berry and it’s “miraculous” effects.

The gathering was called flavor tripping, and the berry is deemed Miracle Fruit. Eating one of these will weird-out your tastebuds to varying degrees and allow you to experience food in a different way – by ditching some of their nature-intended flavor profiles for radically different ones. The promise was that acids and sour foods would take on sweeter notes, while already sweet foods would become cloying. It sounded too good to be true. And in some respects, it is. It’s a crapshoot, really.

First, you bite into the berry, roll the pulp around your tongue for a few minutes (to coat tastebuds) and spit out the seed. If you’ve done it right, it’s effects should last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the potency of the individual fruit, and, as Wired magazine speculates, depending on your genetic makeup. There’s no guarantee that it will work, and no guarantee of how long it will work. You just have to trust that it will. And for the most part, it did: A few people reported that the berry worked instantly, but others say the effects were extremely subtle until a second berry was ingested. (I had ordered extra berries for this scenario.)

For their price ($3 each), they’re not anything you would reach for when you want a snack (and the Miracle Fruit’s taste isn’t anything to write home about, either). So, are they worth it? Read on for the rundown and some comments from flavor-trippers.

The awesome:

• Lemons tasted like summer lemonade – the good kind – not the kind that tastes like lemon-flavored sugar water.

• Limes were candy-like.

• Apple cider vinegar tastes very similar to bottled apple juice. I could drink it straight from a cup.
• Kumquats reminded me of tart oranges.
• Sour Patch Kids: The gummy candy turns sickeningly sweet.
• Radishes were like eating jicama: Crunchy and slightly sweet, absent of the radish’s spicy bite.

The just-OK:

• We had read that Guinness would taste like chocolate shakes, but instead, it was like sipping carbonated iced tea.
• Tabasco sauce: Much sweeter, though still with the spice. Try this sparingly.
• Goat cheese: Change in flavor was subtle, almost cheesecake-like.
• Red wine tastes like plum wine.

The awful:

• Sour cream is bland.
• The general consensus was that absinthe gets worse with every sip.

Side note: If you’re going to have your own flavor-tripping party, note that heartburn is a major concern because of all the acids being consumed. “Next time you have one of these parties you should have antacids on hand,” said my friend Joe, who pretty much sat in silent, esophageal agony while we retired to Guitar Hero for the evening. (Sorry, Joe!)

Here’s what some of our guests had to say about the experience. I’ll add more as they come in. Hopefully with these different opinions, you’ll be able to gauge whether or not it’s worth it to hold a flavor tripping party of your own.

Devin: “I was actually not expecting the tiny little berry to work at first. I was even more skeptical once I started rolling the berry around in my mouth. I could barely taste it! As soon as I spit the pit out, the first thing I went for was a lemon. Wow! The extremely sour and lip puckering sensation that normally accompanies citrus fruit was gone…instead I was left with what tasted like sugary pink lemonade from a hot dog stand. The berry indeed made everything taste sweeter. I wish I had sampled more items, however, before I ate a big chip covered in Tabasco sauce. Not even that magical berry could cut through the spicy Tabasco.”

Mark: “The berry worked well for me the second time around because the first time, I chewed it rather than let it melt in my mouth. The sour flavors had the most profound effect while the spicy flavors had the least effect. My appetite increased because I wanted to try all the different flavors and I found myself just constantly snacking. Since I didn’t have any expectations beforehand, berry tripping was a cool experience.”

Roxanne: “The berry had an immediate effect on fruits like lemons and limes, making them sweet and sugary, but it didn’t noticably change my taste buds when I tried anything salty or spicy. Also, it wore off rather quickly.”

Joe: “I thought it was gonna be more of a significant change, but it was more subtle. It was interesting and I enjoyed it nonetheless.”

Mike: “I like the berry very much! I’m tempted to think that our batch was perhaps ‘stale’ or something similar – the effect was very understated, especially before I had the second berry. After that, though, I could really tell the difference in the fresh citrus (they were edible, though not quite like eating a sweet orange) and the radishes (the familiar, peppery bite was gone). The effect was less obvious in the vinegar and hot sauce (the strong vinegar smell might have contributed to that) and the cheese, which just tasted somewhat bland. Overall, I enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to trying it again, perhaps with “fresher” (or more local) batch.”

Me: I thought it was pretty rad, but do agree that the effects wore off sooner than I had thought it would. I had gotten the berries from MiracleFruitMan.com, based in Florida (and mentioned in the NY Times piece) and they arrived frozen, so I imagine there’s a huge difference in trying the berries right off the plant than trying them frozen. I do know that they tend to deteriorate almost immediately after being picked, so I wonder if they would have been shipped frozen had they come from the local California farm (where there’s a huge waitlist). I imagine that buying them while they’re in season (whenever that is) will heighten the effect.

– Cynthia Furey

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 5:53 pm and is filed under At the table, Food oddities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.