Last night for my birthday dinner, I assembled a mini-buffet of fingers foods — apples, oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, rhubarb, green olives, black olives, cheddar cheese, swiss cheese, crackers, tortilla chips, guacamole, salsa, creole dip, pickles, bologna, salami, ham, smoked turkey — and then, when the kids had come to the table, broke out the secret ingredient: miracle fruit tablets.
In case you’ve never heard of “miracle fruit” or “miracle berries,” are apparently a West African fruit which alters the taste of food eaten the hour thereafter, thusly:
The berries are perishable and expensive; the second-grade solution is the tablets, which use extract in a base of corn starch. (The above graphic was taken from an eBay seller of the tablets. Whether you search eBay or generally online for a vendor, the cost is roughly fifteen dollars for a ten-tablet pack.)
We didn’t have as extreme a set of reactions as detailed here — probably, again, because we were using the tablets instead of fresh berries — but there were noticeable results, to wit:
Rhubarb without its sour doesn’t taste like the same plant.
Green olives? No real difference. Black olives were sweeter.
Swiss cheese lost its bitterness. Cheddar cheese lost its tang, leaving it bland.
Dill pickles became sweet pickles. (This is not a good thing.)
A sour cream-based dip lost all of its sourness.
Salsa tasted sweet, as it it had been made with peaches instead of tomatoes.
Oranges tastes like tangerines. Lemons and limes were still tart, though I didn’t sample them beforehand to see how sour these ones were.
Smoke oysters lost almost all of their flavor.
Sprite tasted like a fountain drink that accidentally put too much syrup in the mix.
Most other things, like the various prepared meats, tasted subtly “off.”
The effect varied from person to person; Sariah in particular complained that everything tasted just like normal. After about half an hour, it was pretty apparent that the effect was wearing off for everyone.
This concludes our experimental report.
Normally I don’t post reviews for two movies in a row out of the same set, but I couldn’t find my notes for the review I had originally slated to post tonight; the review is all written, but the Notable Totables are still only a handwritten tally, probably buried somewhere on my desk. (If they’re not, I’ll have to rewatch the movie at 20x to recreate the tallies.) I have another review in the same situation, the Notable Totables are AWOL, and another two written for movies that I only have on VHS, and my video capture card didn’t want to play nice tonight.
