This is very interesting.
Kirk
Subject: Miracle Fruit-Berry Turns Sour to Sweet By Altering Taste Bud
To Make Lemons Into Lemonade, Try 'Miracle Fruit'
Berry Turns Sour to Sweet By Altering Taste Buds;
A Lure to Scientists
By JOANNA SLATER
March 30, 2007; Page A1
ARLINGTON, Va. -- At a party here one recent
Friday, Jacob Grier stood on a chair, pulled out a
plastic bag full of small berries, and invited
everyone to eat one apiece. "Make sure it coats
your tongue," he said.
Mr. Grier's guests were about to go under the
influence of miracle fruit, a slightly tart West
African berry with a strange property: For about
an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes
sweet.
Within minutes of consuming the berries, guests
were devouring lime wedges as if they were candy.
Straight lemon juice went down like lemonade, and
goat cheese tasted as if it was "covered in
powdered sugar," said one astonished partygoer. A
rich stout beer seemed "like a milkshake," said
another.
Synsepalum dulcificum After languishing in
obscurity since the 1970s, miracle fruit, or
Synsepalum dulcificum, is enjoying a small
renaissance. In-the-know food lovers from Hawaii
to Finland are seeking out the berry as a culinary
curiosity. In Japan, it's freeze-dried and canned
or sold in tablets. Some restaurants there have
featured it as an avant-garde dessert, including
at Tokyo's Mandarin Oriental hotel. So has the
Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach, Fla., where two
miracle-fruit shrubs are planted in the hotel's
garden. Growers like Curtis Mozie of Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., are racing to keep up with the
recent demand. The 63-year-old retired postman has
cultivated the slow-growing shrub for a decade,
and now says he has hundreds of them at a nursery
near his home. Most of the small number of U.S.
growers sell cuttings or seeds for chefs or other
aficionados to grow their own plants, rather than
shipping the highly perishable berries. After a
food lovers' blog called EatFoo, to which Mr.
Grier contributes, began spreading word in
February about Mr. Mozie's product, he raised his
prices to $1.80 from $1 per fruit. He ships them
overnight, because the red berry -- about the size
of a grape with a large pit -- turns brown and
unappetizing within a day or so after it's picked.
Scientists say a protein in the fruit works by
binding to taste buds and altering the tongue's
so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour
foods are eaten. A French explorer known as the
Chevalier des Marchais first encountered the
effects in 1725 somewhere in West Africa, says
Adam Gollner, who is writing a book about miracle
fruit. The chevalier saw villagers eat the berry
before consuming gruel and palm wine, so he gave
it a try himself.
In 1852, a British surgeon described the fruit in
a pharmaceutical journal as a "miraculous" berry.
In the early 20th century, a renowned botanist for
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, David
Fairchild, was the first person to bring miracle
fruit from Africa to the U.S., says Linda
Bartoshuk, a professor at the Center for Smell and
Taste at the University of Florida.
Lloyd Beidler, a biology professor at Florida
State University, and a colleague isolated the
active protein in the berry in 1968, which Dutch
researchers doing similar work dubbed "miraculin."
Around the same time, Ms. Bartoshuk was doing
research on the berry for the U.S. Army, which
never went as far as adding it to rations. She
remembers eating a bologna sandwich with mustard
at the laboratory's cafeteria during the testing.
It tasted "like a sweet."
Because miracle fruit is so delicate, scientists
for years have tried to genetically engineer other
organisms to produce miraculin. This led to a
series of failures. In the 1990s, researchers
tried unsuccessfully to alter tobacco plants,
yeasts and even E. coli bacteria to produce the
same protein, which is one of seven known to have
a sweetening effect, but the only one that turns
sour to sweet.
Last year, a team of scientists led by Hiroshi
Ezura, a professor at Tsukuba University near
Tokyo, said they finally succeeded -- with
lettuce. In a scientific report published in
Federation of European Biochemical Societies
Letters, the researchers wrote that two grams
produce roughly the same effect as one miracle
fruit.
Mr. Ezura, who is collaborating with Inplanta
Innovations Inc., a Japanese biotech company, says
his team next hopes to develop a genetically
modified tomato, possibly for commercial use as a
low-calorie sweetener or as an additive for foods
targeting diabetics, since it removes the need for
sugar.
Several miracle-fruit growers in Florida also say
cancer patients occasionally seek out the fruit
because it reportedly alleviates a metallic taste
in the mouth that is one side-effect of
chemotherapy. There is no scientific research
supporting the claim.
Miracle fruit remains in a kind of regulatory
limbo in the U.S. It's perfectly fine to grow and
sell it, because the Food and Drug Administration
doesn't require prior approval to sell fresh
fruits, though it can intercede if it suspects
problems. The trickier part comes when people try
to use it as an additive in other foods. That's
when regulators start asking questions.
Two American entrepreneurs, Robert Harvey and Don
Emery, tried this route back in the 1970s but the
venture ended in heartbreak. Their initial focus
was on products for diabetics, but some of their
financial backers, which included Reynolds Metals
Co. and Barclays Bank PLC, had a loftier goal.
"They were interested in replacing half the sugar
industry in the world," Mr. Harvey says.
Mr. Harvey figured out how to turn miracle fruit
into a dried powder and then a tablet. His
company, Miralin Co., explored making everything
from chewing gum to a miraculin-coated drinking
straw. It developed recipes for diabetics which
assumed people would pop a miracle-fruit tablet
before eating the results.
Reynolds, now part of Alcoa, then owned the Eskimo
Pie brand of frozen snacks and suggested trying
miraculin-coated ice pops. In the summer of 1974,
a group of Harvard Business School students
conducted ice-pop taste tests on Boston
playgrounds, giving children a choice between
regular ice pops and miraculin-coated ones. The
children preferred the latter by a wide margin,
Mr. Harvey says.
That same year brought a big setback: The FDA sent
a letter calling miraculin a "food additive"
requiring years of testing. The letter effectively
scuttled the venture, which was on the verge of
selling products and wasn't prepared to spend
money on extensive testing. Miralin filed for
bankruptcy and fired 280 employees.
It's only in the past five years that "I'm able
about to laugh about this instead of crying," says
Mr. Harvey, now 75 years old, who went on to a
lucrative career making blood pumps used in heart
surgery.
The berry has lured other entrepreneurs. A few
years ago Kodzo Gbewonyo, a biochemist in New
Jersey, took early retirement from drug maker
Merck & Co. to develop miracle fruit and other
native West African plants. Mr. Gbewonyo fondly
recalls eating the berry as a boy growing up in
Ghana. He says he sometimes uses the berry to add
sweetness -- he calls it "body and smoothness" --
to a glass of cabernet. His company, BioResources
International, received a patent in 1999 for a
method of purifying miraculin and is exploring
whether the extract can be approved in the U.S. as
a dietary supplement.
At the Arlington party hosted by Mr. Grier, a
barista at a Georgetown bakery and coffeehouse,
guests milled around a table covered with a wide
assortment of tart and sour foods -- lemons,
limes, grapefruits, pomelos, rhubarb, dill
pickles, cheeses and sour candy.
"Rhubarb is the big winner, it's like a sugar
stick," said Lalitha Chandrasekhar, a 22-year-old
researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
Paul Sherman, 27, who works at a nonprofit group
that studies campaign finance, followed his
miracle fruit with strawberries and found them
"like strawberry-flavored candy ... almost too
sweet." It was, he concluded, "the strangest
gustatory experience I have ever had in my life."
Write to Joanna Slater at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117522147769754148
.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
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