#miraculin

OK, yes, that is misquoting and overstating the title, but I couldn’t resist.

Who Killed the Miracle Berry? S2:E1 | 5.22.2019 (Proof, America’s Test Kitchen)

In the 1970s, the Miracle Berry was poised to become the sugar replacement of choice. It was hailed as the solution to the diabetes epidemic, and was preferred to every other sugar alternative in blind taste tests. The fruit contains a taste-altering protein, miraculin, that makes sour foods taste sweet. So why haven't you heard of it? Did "big sugar" engineer its downfall? And can modern food entrepreneurs reposition the miracle berry as the future of sweet?

It’s a really fascinating podcast episode. (Spoiler: I will note here that the second question in the above summary is more or less the answer to the first question.)

It came up again because some people I know were purchasing miraculin tablets off Amazon and tasting every sour thing they could, and raving about them. So I decided to give it a try. I picked up some Miracle Frooties (seriously, that’s the name) because that was the brand they’d tried. Per instructions, let the pill dissolve on my tongue -- takes 5-10 minutes -- then tried some relatively fresh squoze lime juice. THAT was a revelation, let me tell you! It’s not that the tartness/sourness of lime completely goes away, but it gets pushed WAY into the background, You can really taste the sweetness and complexity in a way that you can’t when the sour note dominates.

The one downside to this is the aftertaste. Miraculin + lime has a lingering weird aftertaste. It can’t properly be called artificial -- miraculin isnt, quite -- but ... well. If you’re one of the people who gets the aftertaste from stevia -- and I am -- it’s like that. Slightly soapy, slightly metallic, much weaker than the stevia aftertaste, but much much MUCH longer lasting. Also resistant to being rinsed out of your mouth with water. (To be honest, I’m not sure how much was miraculin aftertaste and how much was lime, or how much was the interaction. I didn’t taste anything like that until after I’d tried the lime.

Despite the fact that Proof rather determinedly avoids making the conclusion, it’s transparently obvious that the story of miraculin, and why it’s only just now becoming a thing, is a story of fairly epic governmental corruption during a time when it was very distracted by Watergate. Someone -- Proof rather determinedly does not say that it was Big Sugar or anyone specific -- put a great deal of effort into compromising the process, very successfully. (The fact that Big Sugar did, as is now well known, put a great deal of time and effort into burying the details of how very bad for you sugar can be is discussed in this context.) 

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZRGKqiLbGM)

marie! (the aristocats)

merryweather! (sleeping beauty)