Miracle fruit

Miracle fruit is the berry of a plant indigenous to West Africa which contains a glycoprotein called miraculin. This protein binds to the sweet receptors on your tongue, causing everything you eat to taste sweet for about an hour after you coat your tongue in miracle berry pulp (or tablets, like these, which contain an extract.)

When you’ve dosed yourself with miracle berry, strong beer tastes like creme soda. Lemons and limes taste like candies. Cream cheese tastes like cheesecake. Sour candy tastes like sweet candy! Grapefruit tastes like grapefruit candy!

Then, an hour later, as you’re spooning cream cheese into your mouth like a stoner with an empty fridge, your guts start to hurt. They pang, and tear, worse and worse, and you set down the cup, suddenly realizing that you can’t eat a pound of acidic fruit just because it tastes okay. The curdled cream-cheese and fruit cocktail erupts out of your gullet and onto your rug, washing the last of the protein from your tongue, and you taste the bitterness of shame.