DOSE:

3 fruits

oral

Miracle Berry

BODY WEIGHT:

230 lb

These were my first experiences with miracle fruit. I'd missed an opportunity to try them a year earlier and a friend had been pressing me to try them ever since.

We ordered a pile of fresh, undried miracle berries from an online vendor for $3 a piece in May 2008. When they arrived, about 1/4 of them were kind of ugly and brownish. We had planned to serve them to guests at a dinner, so a bunch seemed unservable as they arrived.

When we first got them, we tried one each, chewed off the flesh of the fruit and held in our mouths for 2ish minutes total. The effect on lemon wedges was amazing. It was like really sweet lemonade. The effect on seltzer water was quite strong, it tasted very sweet. I was really impressed.

I was also left with a strange feeling in my head, sort of a weird floating sensation like I'd been holding my breath. Also got a very mild stomach ache. I wasn't sure what to make of those effects, related or not?

We immediately froze about 10 of the fruit, but kept some in the fridge because I wasn't sure if freezing would destroy the miraculin / essential chemical, as we'd read some say. The ones in the fridge were stored in a fruit-specific plastic bag in a foam container to help keep temperature fluctuations to a minimum.

I tried one from the frozen group 3 days later and it was fully effective. The ones we froze immediately were also fully effective 9 days after we received them and they delighted friends who tried them.

Unfortunately, the initial 'experiment' resulted in me forgetting / deciding not to freeze the rest until 3 days after they arrived. They all looked a bit worse for the wear, more brown spots and soft spots populated the fruit. Three weeks after we froze the fruit that had been in the fridge 3 days, they had become nearly ineffective. Where one fruit had a strong effect in the past, now 3 fruit were barely noticeable in their sweetening effect. Ugh.

Perhaps the most interesting effect was on unsweetened plain yogurt, normally strongly sour and kind of harsh without anything mixed in. After the miracle fruit, the yogurt tasted more like a sweet sour cream.

I experienced the weird light head feel and mild stomach discomfort each time I tried them, which was unexpected for me. I also had a strange post-miraculin tongue feeling, a tiny bit like I'd very, very lightly burned my tongue on hot tea. Not so 'burned' that it hurt at all, but more like it felt 'scraped' or scratchy or something. I am writing this as I still have that feeling and it isn't very easy to describe. Not exactly unpleasant, but odd. It also seems like it might increase salivation slightly, hard to say for sure based on the small number of trials.

Another friend who tried miracle fruit also reported a stomach ache. However, there is the confound that one is often exuberantly experimenting with very sour things, so it is hard to say for sure what the actual 'cause' was.

Unfortunately, the weakened miracle fruit were now useless and kind of grim looking, so that's a couple hundred dollars for a cup of pre-compost. Ah well.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 71981
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 19, 2008	Views: 24,803
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Miracle Berry (425) : General (1), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)