A Fanciful Little Fruit

No – I’m not talking about Prince. This has to do with a real fruit. There’s an interview over at Democracy Now! between Amy Goodman and Adam Leith Gollner that includes a discussion of a fruit imported from Africa and grown in Florida called … well, he only calls it the “miracle berry”. It’s got some remarkable properties – if you put it in your mouth and swish it around, sour things that you eat afterwards taste very sweet.

During the interview, Goodman used the miracle berry and then ate a lime as she talked. She gushed about the sweetness of the lime. She couldn’t get enough. It was “ecstatically sweet”, she said, like a very sweet orange.

The miracle berry has been around for quite a while, and its properties are well known, but it has suffered from a problem associated with many fruits we don’t see – it has a short shelf life. So during the 1970’s, an inventor named Robert Harvey came up with a way to encapsulate the berry’s properties in a pill. The potential was enormous – it would have replaced artificial sweeteners.

OK, so here is what happened. He started making miracle fruit tablets, because these fruits don’t have a very long shelf life, and that’s another reason that many of these fruits from the tropics don’t make it here, is that they just have no shelf life whatsoever. But he put them in tablet form. Diabetics were going crazy for them. Kids were choosing miracle fruit popsicles over regular popsicles by this enormous margin. And companies, other corporations started getting interested. And Harvey was turning down offers in the billions for control—billions of dollars were being offered to him for this, because it looked like it was poised to become an all-natural alternative to sugar. And even the artificial sweetening industry was very concerned about this threat of this small red berry.

But what happened was, that just as it was about to launch, Harvey’s company, his office was raided by industrial spies. His files were stolen. He got into high-speed car chases in the middle of the night. People were following him.

That all sounds unreal, so skepticism is in order, but this is real: The FDA banned his pill, which it regulated as a food additive. Maybe there’s a reason other than the ones intimated here.

But the berry itself is not subject to FDA regulation, and it is possible now to ship it overnight all over the country, so its potential is slowly being untapped. It is not metabolized as glucose, so diabetics can freely use it and taste the wonders of sweetness again. Chemotherapy patients lose their ability to taste sweet food, and it all tastes rubbery and metallic to them, and the miracle berry helps them too. Then there is just the obesity problem in general.

I just had a nice go-round with Steve over at Rabid Sanity and defended market regulation. That’s a polarized position, as I know as well as anyone that the problem with regulation is the those whom we seek to regulate usually wind up running the regulatory agencies. It’s a huge problem, and possibly the reason why the pill based on the miracle berry was taken off the market. Substitute sweeteners are a huge market.

Read more about the magic fruit here.