A few months ago, NOTCOT featured this strange berry called miracle fruit. It’s a cranberry-sized West African berry that makes sour foods taste sweet! It sounded so intriguing, and also a little crazy (bogus??) becaused they also called it a “magic berry”… Apparently it does the trick by numbing your bitter and sour taste buds for a couple of hours.

Looks like this fruit has managed to create a following. The NYTimes had a little exposé on “flavour tripping parties” where people experiment with the effects of this fruit. There’s a video too, if you want to see people’s reactions. It kind of sounds like a drug… but hey, it’s the NYTimes so it’s probably safe?

Anyway, this is of particular interest to me because I work in a lab which researches bitter, sour and sweet taste receptors, among other things. It’d be pretty fun for our lab to host a little taste tripping party of our own. Maybe??!? We’ll see…