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A few blissfully naive years ago, the cranberry-look-alike miracle berry was just an innocent tongue tripper turning lemons sweet and wasabi into doughnut glaze on our palates. Today: The end for world hunger? That's what Chicago chef Homaro Cantu believes. At last week's annual TED conference, Cantu presented his plan to use the berry's natural sweetening effect to turn otherwise inedibly bitter (yet wildly growing) plants -- like grass -- into something more palatable, reports Wired. Just chew the berry and presto -- Kentucky bluegrass tastes like tarragon.
It sounds like science fiction until you've tried it for yourself, but this little berry really does transform even the most sour foods. The effect comes from the berry's glycoprotein, miraculin, which cloaks the sour and bitter buds on our tongues and usually lasts about an hour. The use is not new -- West African tribes were fermenting them with wild plants back in the 1800s, and chef Cantu's team has already successfully applied it to cactus and straw. He even makes a faux maple syrup for his daughters' morning waffles, with only corn starch, water, lemon juice and a dose of miracle berry, he tells Wired. And faux-sweet soda: carbonated water, lemon juice, berry.
There are potential health benefits, too. The berry could work as a natural food sweetener for diabetics and even eliminates the metallic flavor chemotherapy patients taste in food, reports Wired. The Mayo Clinic in Florida is currently testing the effectiveness on patients, though skeptics question the berry's mass capability to reduce famine. The berry is expensive, they say, but one berry can make 16 serving tablets.
For now, the experiments continue while Cantu and his team work on a miracle berry diet book slated for next Christmas. The plan is to package it together with a month's supply of miraculin.
What do you think? Would you try to trick your tongue?
Read about one writer's experience tasting the miracle berry at The Huffington Post.
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3-08-2011 @12:26PM Esther said... There are some great potential applications here -- for people with diabetes, chemo patients, etc. -- but "ending world hunger" is stretching things. Humans don't just avoid eating grass because it tastes bitter; we simply don't have the digestive systems built to handle it. (Compare our measly single stomachs to cows, who have multiple stomachs and go through a process of regurgitating, and re-digesting their food.) I'm sure that there are some foods out there that are very nutritious but taste inedible, but grass isn't one of them, and Cantu doesn't give a lot of examples.
There's also the fact that we're working against evolution here: salt, sugars, fats, etc. taste good precisely because they're fundamental to our health. Long-term use of miracle berries might be useful for sabotaging our health (e.g. eating a starvation-level diet that tastes delicious), but it's not a miracle answer for parts of the world where people are genuinely malnourished.
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3-09-2011 @5:12PM kirriss said... Your logic is faulty. Humans are most certainly set up to digest greens. Salad anyone?
Ruminants (usually cloven-hooved, multi-stomached, vegetarian) only have one set of teeth - lower jaw, and short intestines which are designed to handle the digestive needs of a masticating (crushing) jaw. Regurgitate and chew some more.
Humans (and horses, donkeys, etc.) have teeth on both jaws and both tear and crush their food and therefore only have the need for one stomach and a long intestine. Both omnivores and carnivores eat grass. It just doesn't have the amount of protein we meat eaters need, but it is edible and digestible.
A horse owner for 40+ years. I know a little bit about this.
3-08-2011 @2:14PM dickn2000b said... Uuuuuhhhh...excuse me, did I miss something? What is the actual name of this "miracle berry?" I read the article twice and failed to find it. It would have been, not only nice, but informative to the reader to have included this important information.
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3-08-2011 @2:20PM Jon Kaufmann said... Apparently the name is the Miracle Berry, from which the compound Miraculin is derived. I have heard about this berry before; can't recall if I heard any other name used for it.
3-08-2011 @2:32PM Bella said... No - you didn't miss anything, they didn't mention the name of the berry. I'm wondering if it's a genetically engineered fruit.
3-08-2011 @11:24PM GEORGE said... Perhaps this gifted journalist felt it unnecessary to actually identify the subject of his article. At least his grammar and spelling were better than so many of the current crop of writers.
3-08-2011 @5:20PM Jeff said... The scientific name of the "Miracle Berry" is Synsepalum dulcificum.
3-08-2011 @6:44PM gobo said... It's literally called "Miracle Berry". Some stores carry it -- and that is its name. No, it's not genetically engineered.
3-08-2011 @6:53PM ASmith said... "Miracle" is a little misterming, isn't it? That's a word whose use is for simple, readily-apparent, blessings...not a foreign berry rumored to be useful. --Sugarcoated. (Maybe, "berry"-coated.)
3-08-2011 @2:19PM dickn2000b said... Oh, and my other comment is: there is a lot of naivete in this article. Straw and grasses are primarily cellulose. The human digestive system cannot process cellulose into useable energy (glucose). Termites can, ungulates can, but not humans.
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3-08-2011 @3:58PM Diane said... All grass is edible and very nutritious and healing for the human body and most have no taste or very little taste but is delicious in a green smoothie or juiced.Lots of health concious people eat and drink natural green drinks ie. wheat grass, alfalfa even grass that grows on your lawn.It's just that Americans are so uneducated about simple things in nature that are so good for you.I reccoment the book Green Smoothie Revolution by Victoria Boutenko,it will change your life.
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3-08-2011 @5:22PM Alex said... Maybe you have several stomachs and can digest grasses. I don't . Grasses are for cattle and assorted varieties of animals with four legs. There ain't no berry that will make me eat grass. This must be another idea of the Tea people or the Taliban! Give me real food or give me death!
3-08-2011 @4:04PM Jenispiel said... I've tried this miracle berry and it does make bitter, nasty tasting medicine taste sweet enough to take. I have had to take some liquid medicine for my bronchitis that contains morphine, and believe me, without the miracle berry to coat my tongue, I would gag taking the medicine. I have checked it out, and it is not a genetically engineered fruit.
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3-08-2011 @7:21PM paul said... let me see if I got this straight....
If I can use Miracle Grow on my Miracle Plant to grow my Miracle Berry's? and be miraculously healthy then hopefully my diabetes will go away by a miracle......
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3-08-2011 @8:43PM Rebecca said... I actually bought two boxes of these berries in small tables form after my sister let me try hers. It is incredible, but I only had 1/2 of a tablet, you let it melt on your tongue and then I had ice water with lots of fresh lemons squeezed into it, it really works, the water was so sweet tasting that I could not even drink it, tasted like lemonade with way too much sugar
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3-09-2011 @12:32PM danielpklein said... Thinking that this will solve world hunger is just foolishness. Does Cantu really think that taste is what stands in the way of feeding people?!?!?! Besides the fact that money is usually the issue, the human stomach can't properly digest a lot of grass, that's why we don't eat it (wheat grass, alfalfa, dandelion are a different story). On the other hand, It seems to have great potential as a diet food.
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