The Fruit Hunters Read online

  We venture deeper into the wonderland of a garden, passing the remains of a prehistoric asteroid. I pick up a pink, pincushion-shaped monkey fruit with a foamy yellow interior; it tastes like marshmallows. Benjamin points out some wizened, brown, nail-sized pods containing Grains of Paradise, sweet, crispy seeds chewed by parents and then applied to children’s sleeping faces to prevent nightmares. I crackle a few kernels between my teeth. They taste sublime—like chocolate-cardamom pellets dipped in clove-infused rose water. In the Middle Ages, European royalty imported these paradise grains by the boatload, considering them to be a literal taste of heaven.

  A Nu Ngan, or man of the roots, is a traditional doctor specializing in the forest pharmacopoeia. Urbanization has led to impostors capitalizing on the mystery and misinformation surrounding the area’s myriad plants. A recent editorial in the Cameroon Tribune bemoaned the trend of “doctas” and “gambe men” setting up shop on street corners with herbal cures for any ailment. “What a hoax,” it concludes.

  While modern-day mountebanks sell magic potions at Yaounde’s intersections, many of the garden’s potent medicinal plants remain underutilized. The iboga plant bears yellow teardrop fruits sometimes eaten by elephants. More important, its roots and bark are used in initiation rituals by the Bwiti secret society in southern Cameroon and Gabon. Their entheogenic ceremonies, called “breaking open the head,” are done to establish communication with ancestors. In addition to being a profound hallucinatory experience, iboga eliminates withdrawal symptoms associated with opiate dependency. Heroin addicts have posted online reports of their habit-kicking trips to Cameroon, where extortionate priests in zombie-white face paint orchestrate nauseating rites lasting up to six days. Iboga detox clinics have sprung up in Canada, Mexico and Europe, although the plant remains banned in the United States.

  Leaving the iboga, we come to a shady corner of the garden where another outlawed plant languishes in obscurity. “This is what you came to see,” says Benjamin, pointing at a shrub gently sipping bubbly from a nearby stream. The miracle fruit—called the sweeter in Pidgin, assarbah by the Fante and Synsepalum dulcificum by scientists—is the reason I traveled to Africa. Ever since tasting the miracle fruit with Ken Love and Bill Whitman, I’ve wanted to learn its story. This is where it started. It was in this very garden that David Fairchild first came across it in 1927.

  As he wrote in his memoir Exploring for Plants, it was so muggy when his ship docked at Limbe (then called Victoria) that walking around was like strolling through a Turkish bath. When his guide at the botanical garden pointed out the sweeter plant, he didn’t pay too much attention. He ate a few of the berries, which “were not good enough to become excited over, though not at all bad.” Shortly thereafter, he was offered a beer to quench his thirst. Taken aback by the sweetness of the beer, he suddenly connected the dots—the miracle fruit! “We at once called for some lemons and sure enough, they tasted sweet as oranges,” he wrote. “I had already gathered a quantity of the fruit for seed, but now I stripped the trees.”

  This little red berry was first mentioned in the eighteenth-century diary of Chevalier des Marchais. The editor who assembled his journals (published as Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais en Guinea, en 1725) wrote that, “Chewed without being swallowed, it has the property of sweetening that which one can put afterwards in the mouth which is sour or bitter.” (In fact, it doesn’t sweeten bitterness—only sourness.) In his 1793 History of Dahomey, adventurer and slave trader Archibald Dalzel reported that locals eat it with guddoe, stale bread gruel. The first thorough description, by W. F. Daniell in the Pharmaceutical Journal in 1852, notes that the fruit is consumed by West Africans before eating a number of native foods—kankies (acidulated grain bread), pitto (beer) and fermented palm wine—all of which are shockingly sour. He says it also makes unripe fruits taste “as if they had been solely composed of saccharine matter.”

  As Fairchild wrote, the berry itself isn’t very flavorful; the fruit’s active ingredient is a glycoprotein called miraculin. The Supermanesque miraculin molecule acts like a key into the lock of your taste buds, a piece of a puzzle that only fits in the presence of acidity. Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, a taste physiologist who studied the miracle fruit for the U.S. Army, explains that there are little sugars attached to the miraculin protein. These sugars position themselves right next to—but just out of reach of-—the sweet-sensitive sites on your tongue. The sweet receptors keep trying to get hold of those sugars, almost like a donkey that keeps trying to bite a carrot. But only when you eat a sour food, like a lemon, can the donkey suddenly grab the carrot. When the sugars pop into the sweet receptors, they stimulate a cascade of molecular events resulting in an electrical signal in the nerve. The action potentials propagate along the nerve carrying a message of sweetness to the brain. In other words, the sourness isn’t being converted into sweet; its taste is being overwhelmed by the sugars attached to the protein. You don’t swallow the sugars attached to miraculin. They linger on your tongue for the next hour, waiting to be reactivated by more sourness. And then the effect dissipates.

  After plucking some of the Cameroonian miracle fruits off the garden’s trees, I pop one into my mouth, chew it to release a pleasant squirt of nectar, and then swish it about for a moment to allow the juice to seep over my tongue. I spit out the seed, and conduct my own taste test, trying a number of foods before and after. It does nothing for peanuts. A tangerine is barely altered; a grapefruit tastes slightly better. Palm wine is a fermented, effervescent concoction whose pungency is barely masked by the miracle fruit. Its effect with a lemon, however, is so deliriously sweet that it’s almost frightening.

  There is a deepness to the miraculin flavor that is hard to convey with words. It’s a basso profundo sensation, like the low frequencies in a symphony. Where at first I could barely lick the puckeringly tart African lemon without wincing, now I’m gulping it down, licking up the juice on my chin. Even the bits on my teeth are ecstatically sweet, like liquefied filaments of pure joy. My head is swimming. Neurons never before activated are firing up my central cortex. I greedily eat up the whole lemon, detecting hints of crystallized grapes and berries.

  The American Chemical Society declared it an “unexcelled” sweetener at a national meeting in 1964: “The quality of the miracle-fruit-induced sweetness is more desirable than any of the known natural or synthetic sweeteners.” They especially loved it with strawberries: “The delightful flavor of fresh strawberries eaten after miracle fruit is so wonderful that it defies adequate description.” Other studies found that it’s an all-around flavor enhancer that can transform steak, tomatoes and even certain wines. The media were euphoric: “Babies will go ‘bananas,’ teenagers will be ‘turned-on,’ adults will be overwhelmed!”

  Entrepreneurs issued patents for its use as an appetite stimulant, appetite suppressant and anorexic agent. Major corporations such as Unilever in the Netherlands and the International Minerals and Chemicals Corporation in Illinois (makers of Ac’cent—MSG) undertook studies, but eventually gave up on the fruit because they found the active ingredient too complex to stabilize and synthesize.

  It looked like yet another example of WAWA, an acronym for the region’s many business failures: West Africa Wins Again.

  IN THE LATE 1960S, a young biomedical visionary named Bob Harvey attended a lecture by Bartoshuk, whose speaking engagements at West Point were classified as top secret by the U.S. Army. “I had long hair and granny glasses and was known to be something of a radical,” recalls Bartoshuk.

  “I became fascinated,” says Harvey. At that point, Harvey was thirty-five years old and his invention of a nuclear-powered artificial heart had earned him millions of dollars. “I guess you could say I was independently wealthy at the time, so I was free to choose what I worked on.” He decided to study the miracle fruit under Bartoshuk’s guidance.

  Convinced of the fruit’s potential, he started a company and completed a doctoral dissertation on the fruits titled Gustat
ory Studies Relating to Synsepalum Dulcificum (Miracle Fruits) and Neural Coding. Harvey’s research focused on hamsters, measuring changes in the nerves connecting their taste receptors to their brains using a pulse-width modulation system. “It was not a distinguished thesis,” says Bartoshuk. “I should’ve kicked him in the … I’d never let a student today get away with what he did, but I was inexperienced because he was my first doctoral student. Anyways, he was more focused on the business end of things.”

  Where others had failed, Harvey devised a way to make miraculin available in pill form. After biology professors at Florida State University managed to isolate the active protein in 1968, Harvey developed a method of growing the extract in a nutrient-rich culture yielding a hundred-thousand-fold increase. This concentrate was then freeze-dried, crushed into powder and pressed into tablets. The pills were easily stored, distributed and sold, unlike the fresh berries, which bruise easily and have a shelf life of only two days after being picked.

  Over the next five years, Harvey raised 7 million dollars from investors like Barclays Bank, Reynolds Metals and Prudential Insurance Company to undertake a major commercial project developing products based on the miracle fruit. By the early 1970s, Harvey’s company, Miralin Corporation, was maintaining plantations in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Their trees were yielding over a million berries a year, and they had employees in West Africa paying children $1.00 per liter for wild miracle fruits, which were shipped home in freezer packs.

  Miralin developed a line of sugar-free products—miracle-fruit sodas, miracle-fruit salad dressing and miracle-fruit drops. Their miracle-fruit popsicles were coated in miraculin so that the first few licks would prep the tongue for the sour ice within. In playground tests, these popsicles proved more popular with schoolchildren than those sweetened with sugar. “The results were startling,” says Harvey. “It was preferred by a major majority over a sugar-sweetened product.”

  That never happens.

  The miracle fruit was poised to make billions. Diabetics were already gobbling up miraculin. The corporate behemoths in the sugar industry were hell-bent on its demise. Everybody else wanted a piece of the action. LifeSavers was conducting miraculin tests. Warner-Lambert, which manufactured Dentyne, Chiclets and Trident had developed a miracle-fruit chewing gum. Miralin was approached with eight-figure deals.

  And then it all turned to dust.

  Just as miraculin was about to become widely available, a number of mysterious events took place. “Things started to get very weird,” says Harvey. An unidentified car pulled up to Miralin’s building and men in sunglasses started snapping cameras in employees’ faces to intimidate them. Then, leaving late one evening, Harvey noticed a car idling in front of his office, parked half on the street, and half on the grass. He found it unusual, because everybody in that industrial area had their own parking spot. As he passed the car, he looked in and saw a glowing cigarette tip redden. The car pulled out, following him. Harvey stepped on it. Soon, he found himself in a harrowing ninety-mile-an-hour car chase on winding roads. After one hairpin curve, he yanked on the hand break and came to a stop in some bushes, turning off all his lights. Moments later, the other car flew past him. “Whoever it was, he would’ve had to change his pants after taking that turn at that speed,” says Harvey.

  Another night shortly thereafter, heading back to work after eating turkey tetrazzini for dinner, Harvey and his partner Don Emery were taken aback to see the lights on in their second floor offices. Hurrying into the building, they found their alarm system had been deactivated. By the time they ran up to the second floor, the intruder had escaped through the fire exit. Hearing the metal door bang shut at the shipping dock below, they rushed over to the front window, where they saw a car speed off into the night. File cabinet drawers were open, and files were lying scattered on the floor. A police investigation determined that whoever had ransacked their office had done so professionally: none of the locks were jammed and the alarm system had been fully dismantled.

  A week later, as the intrigue mounted, what Harvey calls a “cataclysmic event” occurred. On September 19, 1974, Sam Fine of the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter saying that “miracle-fruit products” were not allowed to be sold in any form whatsoever. “Immediately, under penalty of law, I had to close the company down,” recalls Harvey.

  Up until that point, Miralin had been assured by key government figures that the miracle fruit would easily attain regulatory approval. After all, studies had concluded that miracle fruits were entirely safe even in massive doses. A hundred-thousand-dollar toxicology study undertaken by Miralin demonstrated that rats eating MFC were healthier than those eating pet food. It had no ill effects, even at three thousand times ordinary human consumption.

  The reason for the ban remains contentious. Miraculin wasn’t a food, ruled the FDA—it was a food additive. Additionally, it didn’t qualify for GRAS certification—Generally Recognized as Safe—a system established in 1958 for ensuring food safety. Any food additive in general use before that point, like sugar or salt or artificial grape flavor, required no premarket approval testing. The miracle fruit had been eaten for centuries in Africa, but miraculin had only recently been isolated. The FDA ruled that a food-additive petition would need to be filed, requiring years and millions of dollars of further testing.

  This was a period of artificial sweetener fever, with heightened debate surrounding saccharin, cyclamate and aspartame. Their stories shed some light on what Miralin would have faced in attempting to legalize their product.

  Following a number of 1960s and 1970s studies linking it to cancer, saccharin was nearly banned by the FDA. Because of consumer protests, it was allowed to stay on the market, sold with labels stating that it “has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals” until 2000, at which point a newly Republican Congress repealed the law stipulating that saccharin must carry a health-warning label.

  Cyclamate was banned by the FDA in 1969. Since that time, cyclamate manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories, has unsuccessfully petitioned the FDA, at a huge expense. In a strange twist, saccharin is banned in Canada, where cyclamate is legal. Hence Canadian Sweet N’ Low and Sugar Twin contain cyclamate, whereas in the States they contain saccharin.

  The legalization of aspartame (Equal and NutraSweet), linked to a host of illnesses from impotency to brain cancer, has engendered many conspiracy theories. Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of G. D. Searle & Company, manufacturer of aspartame, throughout the regulatory period that approved its use in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thanks to his clout, aspartame finally entered the food stream in 1982. Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, the head of the FDA responsible for the decision, came under fire for accepting corporate gifts and left his post in 1983 (that year, NutraSweet brought in $336 million dollars). Hayes was promptly hired by Searle’s public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller. Concerns about aspartame’s toxicity continue to surface in ongoing studies.

  With all these suspicious sweeteners swirling around, perhaps the government was just being extra-prudent. FDA employee Virgil Wodicka claims that the agency disapproved of Miralin staging kiddie taste tests before approval had been granted. In another letter, Wodicka cited toxicologists’ concerns that children under the influence of miracle fruits might start sipping hydrochloric acid or battery acid. Miralin’s executive vice president, Don Emery, has admitted that Miralin’s inexperience in dealing with the regulatory commission may have been a problem.

  “There’s no substance to that charge,” counters Harvey. “We had the biggest nutrition and food-additive lawyers in Washington dealing with the FDA. I had a blue ribbon board of directors. This wasn’t a bunch of schoolkids—this was serious business. We had an excellent rapport with the FDA.” The industrial espionage, the car chase, the break-in—something clandestine was afoot.

  Nixon had just resigned, and the stock markets plunged into the worst chaos since 1929. With Washington in a state of upheaval, Harvey couldn’t even schedule a
hearing with the regulatory commission. His board of directors saw no way forward. They were forced to file for bankruptcy. “To make a real long story real short and sad, I had to collapse everything down and lay everyone off [Miralin had 280 employees] and we all took a huge loss. And in my opinion, so did society.”

  About five years after Miralin folded, Harvey received a phone call from one of his investors in New York, who worked for a marketing company. He had been reviewing proposals from groups vying to undertake a project for one of his clients when he came across a submission that stood out. This group claimed, on their list of accomplishments, to have been hired by a sugar-industry lobbying group to engineer a strategy that eventually led to the demise of Miralin.

  “And they were quite successful,” says Harvey, adding that the same group that rubbed out miraculin also purported to have orchestrated the criminalization of cyclamate. When pressed for more information, Harvey says that he has promised to never reveal the source, and that the group “identified their sponsor only as a sugar group representing worldwide sugar interests.”

  Another source I spoke to, who also asked to remain confidential, asserts that the miracle fruit’s demise can be blamed on a competitor. As Miralin was getting ready to launch, Morley Kare, the director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, was in the final stages of developing sweeteners derived from proteins in two other West African fruits. One was called Monellin, the active ingredient in the serendipity berry. The other was Thaumatin, from the katemfe fruit.

  “His motive was financial,” says my source. “Kare got the idea that Monell would be damaged in the marketplace, so he contacted the FDA to say that the miracle fruit was toxic. It’s an awful story.” (It should be stressed that this allegation cannot be validated: Morley Kare died in 1990, and if he did in fact influence the FDA in their decision, no traces are left pointing at his involvement. Adding to the strangeness, Kare patented the use of artificial grape flavor as a bird repellent, making him the inadvertant father of Grapples.)