Yrys
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... the new "berries à la mode" :
The new party drug: berries
Bert Archer. From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Aug. 12
The berry's journey (second part of the article)
Ghanaians have known about miracle fruit for centuries, planting
the bushes outside their front doors so they could pop a berry
before drinking their palm wine, which didn't really age so much
as go bad over time.
Chemist Lloyd Beidler, who also discovered the 10-day life cycle of
taste bud cells, first studied the fruit in North America in the early
1960s. But it wasn't until Linda Bartoshuk, first at the Natick Army
labs in 1969 and later at Yale University, started doing tests on its
effects on people that things got going.
One of her students, Bob Harvey, decided the fruit was so promising
that he started a company to commercialize it as a sort of sweetener.
But then, according to Prof. Bartoshuk, a professor from Philadelphia
who had his hands on another sweet African berry that he hoped to
market made a phone call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
and convinced it that miracle fruit should be treated as an additive,
not a food. This required years more testing before approval, and
Mr. Harvey ran out of money.
The FDA designation stuck, and miracle fruit has been a minor novelty
item ever since. The main North American sources these days are in
and around Miami, where the tropical plant grows easily. Though the
berry itself will likely remain a novelty, the gene that creates the
sweetness effect has already been isolated and may soon find its way
into products for the diabetic market.
And in case you want to get a head start on the miracle fruit backlash,
order some gymnema sylvestre online. It's an Indian herb that, when
made into a tea, sucks the sweetness out of everything you eat for
about an hour.
(first part of the article)
In this age of locavores' and omnivores' dilemmas, when conversations
among friends inevitably evolve into issues such as whether farmed
organic salmon is actually worse than wild salmon if it's line-caught, it's
appropriate that the modern version of the “recreational drug party” is
all about food.
A berry, to be precise. It's called miracle fruit, a rough translation of
taami or asaa in a couple of the more popular languages in Ghana, where
the shrub that grows it comes from. It's about the size of a wild almond,
about the colour of a cranberry and tastes like just about nothing. But like
its predecessors, it packs a sense-altering jolt. It makes sour things sweet,
but that doesn't do it justice. It's not an aftertaste, not like eating Parmigiano-
Reggiano and then taking a sip of Barolo. This is biochemistry that changes
the way your taste receptors work.
After you've eaten one, a shot glass of white vinegar can taste like Sprite
with a touch of gin. You know what's what, but the berry's telling you otherwise.
It's sensual dysphoria, the root of the basic drug experience familiar to every
parking-lot teenager and executive-bathroom line snorter. And with no nasty
side effects – it's not addictive, there are no hangovers – the parties were
inevitable.
They've been cropping up throughout the United States for the past year,
in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Baltimore, at clubs and in food
bloggers' living rooms. In Brazil, chef Alex Atala has been playing with it in
his cuisine. Though it's been around for centuries, the berry's effects on
humans have been studied in the United States only since 1969. There's been
a miracle fruit café in Tokyo since 2005, but the foodie zeitgeist is just now
biting down hard on this funny little fruit.
Though the experience has been available in pill form in Canada before, the
berries themselves have been hard to come by –until Tyler Clark Burke, band
manager, artist and party organizer, was turned on to them by her friend,
musician Leslie Feist, and decided to start importing them from Florida.
Ms. Burke, 35, will be throwing a bash at Toronto's Drake Hotel tomorrow,
but she recently played host to an intimate pre-party for some of her friends
with her fiancé, designer Jeremy Stewart.
Mr. Stewart, 30, brings out the small dish of 20 berries that were flown in on
dry ice from Miami that morning at the relatively reasonable rate of $5 apiece.
They're only semi-thawed, and we're told to bite lightly, remove the skins with
our tongues and slowly suck the flesh off the large pit.
“Do not eat the pit,” Mr. Stewart says in the tone one imagines having come over
the speakers at Woodstock warning the kids off the brown acid. We all swish and
suck. Someone accidentally bites his pit and looks over, concerned. Mr. Stewart
reiterates. “Do not swallow the pits.” He never says what will happen if we do.
The table in front of us is laid with various sours. I start with a Tear Jerker gumball.
It tastes sour. Too soon. I wait, as others slurp up the lemon.
“It tastes like lemonade,” someone says.
“These are coated with sugar, right?” someone else says. I believe I even hear a giddy
“awesome.” I try again, this time with salt and vinegar chips, which taste like the simple
salted variety. It seems to be working. I reach for a lemon wedge. Yup, lemonade.
Awesome. And I'm the first into the vinegar. Then I'm out of my seat and into the kitchen,
in what I later learn is a standard berry party trope – raiding the host's fridge for anything
to throw against this new toy in my mouth.
Very hot Kozlik's Niagara Classic mustard tastes like French's. A jalapeno pepper tastes like
a green pepper. I eat it whole. Onions taste like onion sprouts and ginger like ginger, but that
doesn't deter me, or several others who have followed me into the kitchen, eating carrots
(which taste like carrots) and shooting tequila (a cheapo that tastes like an anejo ).
And then a friend of Ms. Burke's, actor Amy Rutherford, takes a bite of a second chili pepper
and her face crumples. “Blaachh,” she says. One by one, we come down as the berries begin
to wear off. The glycoprotein called miraculin that had been providing a little kick of molecular
sugar, turning acids into sweets, eventually fades. The whole trip has lasted about an hour.
Ms. Burke and Mr. Stewart are planning another, bigger party at the Drake for later in the
month and are hoping to continue the trend, and their sales, in partnerships with other bars and
restaurants. Their next shipment's going to be 400 berries, which they'll also be selling retail,
so a miracle fruit party of some description should be coming to a club or patio near you before
this geist has spent its zeit.
Special to The Globe and Mail
The new party drug: berries
Bert Archer. From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Aug. 12
The berry's journey (second part of the article)
Ghanaians have known about miracle fruit for centuries, planting
the bushes outside their front doors so they could pop a berry
before drinking their palm wine, which didn't really age so much
as go bad over time.
Chemist Lloyd Beidler, who also discovered the 10-day life cycle of
taste bud cells, first studied the fruit in North America in the early
1960s. But it wasn't until Linda Bartoshuk, first at the Natick Army
labs in 1969 and later at Yale University, started doing tests on its
effects on people that things got going.
One of her students, Bob Harvey, decided the fruit was so promising
that he started a company to commercialize it as a sort of sweetener.
But then, according to Prof. Bartoshuk, a professor from Philadelphia
who had his hands on another sweet African berry that he hoped to
market made a phone call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
and convinced it that miracle fruit should be treated as an additive,
not a food. This required years more testing before approval, and
Mr. Harvey ran out of money.
The FDA designation stuck, and miracle fruit has been a minor novelty
item ever since. The main North American sources these days are in
and around Miami, where the tropical plant grows easily. Though the
berry itself will likely remain a novelty, the gene that creates the
sweetness effect has already been isolated and may soon find its way
into products for the diabetic market.
And in case you want to get a head start on the miracle fruit backlash,
order some gymnema sylvestre online. It's an Indian herb that, when
made into a tea, sucks the sweetness out of everything you eat for
about an hour.
(first part of the article)
In this age of locavores' and omnivores' dilemmas, when conversations
among friends inevitably evolve into issues such as whether farmed
organic salmon is actually worse than wild salmon if it's line-caught, it's
appropriate that the modern version of the “recreational drug party” is
all about food.
A berry, to be precise. It's called miracle fruit, a rough translation of
taami or asaa in a couple of the more popular languages in Ghana, where
the shrub that grows it comes from. It's about the size of a wild almond,
about the colour of a cranberry and tastes like just about nothing. But like
its predecessors, it packs a sense-altering jolt. It makes sour things sweet,
but that doesn't do it justice. It's not an aftertaste, not like eating Parmigiano-
Reggiano and then taking a sip of Barolo. This is biochemistry that changes
the way your taste receptors work.
After you've eaten one, a shot glass of white vinegar can taste like Sprite
with a touch of gin. You know what's what, but the berry's telling you otherwise.
It's sensual dysphoria, the root of the basic drug experience familiar to every
parking-lot teenager and executive-bathroom line snorter. And with no nasty
side effects – it's not addictive, there are no hangovers – the parties were
inevitable.
They've been cropping up throughout the United States for the past year,
in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Baltimore, at clubs and in food
bloggers' living rooms. In Brazil, chef Alex Atala has been playing with it in
his cuisine. Though it's been around for centuries, the berry's effects on
humans have been studied in the United States only since 1969. There's been
a miracle fruit café in Tokyo since 2005, but the foodie zeitgeist is just now
biting down hard on this funny little fruit.
Though the experience has been available in pill form in Canada before, the
berries themselves have been hard to come by –until Tyler Clark Burke, band
manager, artist and party organizer, was turned on to them by her friend,
musician Leslie Feist, and decided to start importing them from Florida.
Ms. Burke, 35, will be throwing a bash at Toronto's Drake Hotel tomorrow,
but she recently played host to an intimate pre-party for some of her friends
with her fiancé, designer Jeremy Stewart.
Mr. Stewart, 30, brings out the small dish of 20 berries that were flown in on
dry ice from Miami that morning at the relatively reasonable rate of $5 apiece.
They're only semi-thawed, and we're told to bite lightly, remove the skins with
our tongues and slowly suck the flesh off the large pit.
“Do not eat the pit,” Mr. Stewart says in the tone one imagines having come over
the speakers at Woodstock warning the kids off the brown acid. We all swish and
suck. Someone accidentally bites his pit and looks over, concerned. Mr. Stewart
reiterates. “Do not swallow the pits.” He never says what will happen if we do.
The table in front of us is laid with various sours. I start with a Tear Jerker gumball.
It tastes sour. Too soon. I wait, as others slurp up the lemon.
“It tastes like lemonade,” someone says.
“These are coated with sugar, right?” someone else says. I believe I even hear a giddy
“awesome.” I try again, this time with salt and vinegar chips, which taste like the simple
salted variety. It seems to be working. I reach for a lemon wedge. Yup, lemonade.
Awesome. And I'm the first into the vinegar. Then I'm out of my seat and into the kitchen,
in what I later learn is a standard berry party trope – raiding the host's fridge for anything
to throw against this new toy in my mouth.
Very hot Kozlik's Niagara Classic mustard tastes like French's. A jalapeno pepper tastes like
a green pepper. I eat it whole. Onions taste like onion sprouts and ginger like ginger, but that
doesn't deter me, or several others who have followed me into the kitchen, eating carrots
(which taste like carrots) and shooting tequila (a cheapo that tastes like an anejo ).
And then a friend of Ms. Burke's, actor Amy Rutherford, takes a bite of a second chili pepper
and her face crumples. “Blaachh,” she says. One by one, we come down as the berries begin
to wear off. The glycoprotein called miraculin that had been providing a little kick of molecular
sugar, turning acids into sweets, eventually fades. The whole trip has lasted about an hour.
Ms. Burke and Mr. Stewart are planning another, bigger party at the Drake for later in the
month and are hoping to continue the trend, and their sales, in partnerships with other bars and
restaurants. Their next shipment's going to be 400 berries, which they'll also be selling retail,
so a miracle fruit party of some description should be coming to a club or patio near you before
this geist has spent its zeit.
Special to The Globe and Mail
