Cabinet: How did Westerners first become aware of miracle fruit?

Adam Leith Gollner: It was first come across by a French explorer called Des Marchais in 1725 on the Gold Coast of Africa. He noted how various tribes were popping miracle fruit berries before they would eat their traditional foods—kankies (cornbread), pitto (palm wine), and guddoe (oatmeal gruel). He tried some and noticed that the berries made these sour foods sweet. The encounter is written about in his journals and in Jean-Baptiste Labat’s Voyage du Chevalier Des Marchais en Guineé, isles voisines, et à Cayenne (1731). And then Dr. W. F. Daniel, a British surgeon stationed in West Africa, described it as the “miraculous” berry in 1852 in a periodical called The Pharmaceutical Journal. After him, several other people investigated miracle fruit, notably a plant explorer named David Fairchild who was one of the first people hired by the US Department of Agriculture to travel overseas and find out what the rest of the world had in terms of fruits and other plants that were useful and could be grown in the US. He brought miracle fruit from West Africa to a USDA agricultural station in Puerto Rico, where it was grown, though not on a large scale. Nothing much happened until the late 1960s, when some entrepreneurs came across it and realized there was enormous potential in this fruit and started doing studies to figure out how to bring it to market.

Do other regions in the world, for example Europe, import or grow the fruit?

There are miracle fruit cafes in Japan where you can have the fruit followed by sodas, ice creams, and desserts that actually aren’t sweet. Miracle fruit grows in tropical and subtropical regions all over the world, but it isn’t really available on a wide scale anywhere besides tropical Africa, where it grows wild. It’s a fair-sized bush, and you pluck the little berry off and pop it in your mouth. There is not a lot of flesh to it, but there is a pleasant squirt of juice that coats your tongue and deactivates all your acid taste buds, so you can only taste the sweet things in foods. You can eat a lemon, and it tastes delicious. If something has no acidity in it, though, it won’t become sweeter. For example, it doesn’t really do much to coffee. The effect lasts about an hour and a half and it doesn’t matter if you have one berry or a thousand—the effect is the same.

Given the berry’s astonishing effect, it’s surprising that Fairchild or his successors didn’t pursue it further.

A whole bunch of people, including the US Army, private researchers, and major chemical corporations, were doing experiments with it. The problem is that miracle fruit doesn’t have a long shelf life; the berry, once plucked, only lasts for a couple of days. And it has a complicated molecular structure which doesn’t lend itself easily to synthesis. In 1968, two young entrepreneurs—Robert Harvey and Don Emery—pulled money together from a variety of investors, set up a company called Miralin, and started doing a very disciplined series of tests. They figured out a way to isolate the active ingredient, which is a glycoprotein, and turn it into a powder, which they called miraculin. The main visionary was Harvey, a young biomedical engineer who had made a lot of money by inventing a number of unusual contrivances, such as a nuclear-powered artificial heart. He came across this fruit and sunk some of his own money into it, and, because of his earlier successes, was able to rally other investors behind the idea. Soon enough, he had raised close to 10 million dollars to focus on figuring out how the fruit works and creating all sorts of products incorporating miraculin. Their FDA approval was pending but by 1973, they had huge plantations up and running in Jamaica, Brazil, Florida, and parts of Africa, and they started creating this marvelous suite of miracle fruit products. They had, for example, popsicles coated with miraculin. The first couple of licks covered the tongue, and then the rest of the popsicle tasted really sweet although there was no sugar in it.

Is the sweetness any different from that of sugar?

It is absolutely different. It isn’t like sugar, because it isn’t exactly a sweetener. It’s an elusive, illusory effect that depends on what you eat afterwards. With lemons, it has a kind of deep sweetness.

But it seems not to be an acquired taste if a young kid could enjoy it immediately.

It is a complex taste but instantly accessible; in Miralin’s market research, children preferred miracle fruit popsicles to traditional ones. Miralin also created a chewing gum; the sugar in regular gum dissipates after ten or fifteen minutes, but miracle fruit gum stayed sweet for over an hour and a half. They had miracle fruit mints, salad dressing, desserts, chewable tablets. They even had a soft drink with miracle fruit in the straw, so that the first sip would contain miraculin and make the rest of the soda taste sweet. They had an entire marketing campaign, a miracle fruit juggernaut.