Miracle Berry

January 9th, 2014
food
A few weeks ago I tried some freeze-dried miracle berry pulp. This contains a protein, miraculin that binds to the taste buds and makes acidic things taste sweet. It was fun to play with, but overall the experience was similar to just putting too much sugar in everything.

I bought the tablets on amazon and they came in packages of 10. Following online advice each person had half a tablet, letting it dissolve on the tongue. It worked for all ~10 of us. We tried lemons, tangerines, tabasco sauce, citric and malic acids, vinegar, pickles, lemon juice, apples, and a few other things. Lemons and lemon juice tasted good to me, but everything else just tasted oversweetened. This was especially a problem with the pickles: it turned standard dill pickles into bread-and-butter style, which I don't like at all. Overall it was fun but I like sour tastes too much to really see the appeal here.

(Most of us took antacid tablets premptively afterwards, and we generally tried to eat only for curiousity so as to limit acid consumption.)

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