Miracle Fruit Through The Looking Glass

My friend Nat has always been interested in fruit. Shortly after college, he devoted nearly a year to mapping out every publicly accessible fruit tree in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nat ultimately decided to get a PhD in ethnobotany. I’m still not precisely sure what ethnobotany is, but at a friend’s wedding, Nat noted that one of the flowers in the main arrangement was not only very rare, but was also hallucinogenic in sufficient quantities.

Nat is a member of the Rare Fruit Society, a national organization unsurprisingly dedicated to the preservation and cultivation of rare fruits. Through the Society, Nat located an exotic fruit farmer named Alex who runs a nursery out of his house called the Papaya Tree, about 20 miles north of Los Angeles. “I don’t really like papayas,” Alex confided in us.

Alex’s nursery turned out to be the fruit equivalent of Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: strange flowers that were sweeter than honey, mutated blueberries that aren’t supposed to grow in our climate, intense bananas the size of my little finger. From Alex’s kitchen we tasted dried jujube chips and sipped homemade carob liqueur, a dark brown elixir with notes of mocha and vanilla oak.

While I was sipping on the carob liqueur I noticed that Nat and Alex were in an intense debate. They were talking about optimal soil acidity and water mineral content required to grow Miracle Fruit. Nat said to Alex in a somewhat hushed tone, “I heard you are one of the few people in the country who has succeeded in growing Miracle Fruit.” Alex just gave a wise nod.

I got up the nerve to ask: “What is Miracle Fruit?”

Alex’s dad disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a small red berry and a slice of lemon. Alex’s dad told me take a test of the lemon. It tasted like a lemon. Not so impressive so far.

“Now slowly suck the fruit off of this little red berry, make sure you mash it up against your tongue really well.” The berry had a slightly sweet and pleasant flavor. “Now take a test of the lemon.” The lemon now tasted like the sweetest orange! I eagerly devoured the entire lemon – it was like candy. This fruit really was a miracle! It made sour things gloriously sweet with no additional calories.

“How long does this miracle fruit effect one’s sense of taste,” I asked, assuming that it might work for 30 seconds on a good day.

“Somewhere between four and eight hours,” Alex said.

Nat explained to me that Miracle Fruit would turn red wine into the finest port. It would transform unsweetened lemon meringue pie. In fact it would make almost anything you eat taste a lot better.

Nat explained that many companies have attempted to commercialize Miracle Fruit but evil forces in the sugar industry have stopped it. There was even a popsicle with a coating of miracle fruit juice (to coat the tongue with the active ingredient, “miraculin”) and a soft drink can with a separate miracle fruit juice chamber. The fruit is apparently native to Cameroon, where the local soup is sour unless you coat your tongue with miracle fruit juice first.

The catch is that Miracle Fruit is extremely difficult to grow (unless you are Alex) and also very difficult to buy in this country. (There is apparently an African man in New Jersey who sells the stuff for research purposes, though.) But if you get the chance to try it, I highly recommend it. It will transform your views on the nature of taste and make you perhaps more conscious that you are a computer whose program can be rewritten by pressing the appropriate buttons. If a true miracle makes us question what is real and what is not real, Miracle Fruit is appropriately named.