North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Michael Nave <jmichaelnave@yahoo.com>]

Seems pretty on topic to me. It's easy to grow and it
can really change the taste of fruits. Cranberries
become sweet. To me, tomatoes become almost sickenly
sweet. I'm waiting for the day when I have some
miracle fruit and sea buckthorn juice at the same time



--- "Brungardt, Sam" <Sam.Brungardt@state.mn.us>
wrote:

> from the Wall Street Journal
> To Make Lemons Into Lemonade, Try 'Miracle Fruit'
> 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.
> 
> 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."
> This article can be viewed at:
> http://www.truthabouttrade.org/article.asp?id=7335
> 
> 
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