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.
