MAGIC BERRIES: The miracle fruit, synsepalum dulcificum, grows wild in tropical West Africa.SATOSHI OKUBO
Imagine sucking on a lemon that tastes as sweet as honey, or munching on what you think is a crunchy candy only to discover it’s a pickled onion. Such is the taste-bud trickery experienced at so-called flavor-tripping parties. The secret to the flavorful deceptions is a small red berry from West Africa called miracle fruit, which itself has very little flavor, but can make sour or acidic foods taste extremely sweet when eaten soon after the berry contacts the tongue. So bizarre is the fruit’s effect that just one taste was enough to convince Japanese food scientist Keiko Abe, of the University of Tokyo, to launch into an entirely new area of study.
In the early 1980s, Abe was researching oryzacystatin, the first recognized plant ...
