History of miracle fruit

This small red berry has been used in West Africa to improve the taste of acidic foods. Since the miracle fruit itself has no distinct taste, this tasty modifying function of the fruit had been regarded as a miracle.

This little red berry was first mentioned in the 18th century diary of explorer Chevalier des Marchais. The dotro 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 1852, the chemist W. F. Daniell was the first European to scientifically study it and he gave the name ‘miraculous berry’.

The so-called ‘miracle berry’ was rediscovered in the 1920s by a US Department of Agriculture collecting expedition. It is an ornamental shrub, usually branched with dense foliage that gr0ws no higher than 6 feet and bears several crops each year.

It took until 1968, for separate groups of scientists to isolate the berry’s active ingredients. In 1968, Beidler in Tallahassee and independently – H. van der Wel at the Unilever Research Laboratories in Vlaardingen, Holland, showed the active principle of miracle fruit to be a glycoprotein with a molecular weight of 44 000. It has been named miraculin.

In 1974, a petition for affirmation of the GRAS status of miracle fruit was submitted by the Miralin Company, mainly based on the fact that miracle fruits have been consumed by human since before 1958. In 1977, the petition was denied by the FDA.
History of miracle fruit