Category: Unexpected Associations

Owen Hsiao

For the taste experience, I tried many nine different kind of food and to my surprise all the the items tasted well for me except the vinegar.

The list of the items I tried and my association with them are listed below: Lime, lemon, banana, blueberry, grapefruit, chocolate, vinegar, grape, coffee.

I really enjoyed eating the citric fruits such as lemon, lime, and grapefruit. They tasted very sweet after the berry. These fruits tasted so good that I made me keep going back to get more. Also, it’s really funny how my tongue tasted the sweetness after the berry but the other part of my body are still sensing the sourness in these fruits. For example, although these fruits tasted sweet to me, my facial muscles still couldn’t help to make the sour face. Another thing that is surprising to me is that the food that used to be sweet lost their sweetness after the berry. Fruits such as banana, blueberry, and grape tasted like stale water after I tried the berry. It was really interesting for me. The only item which I couldn’t stand was the apple cider vinegar. It was very sour that I couldn’t stand it.

In sum, this unexpected taste experience is very interesting because the new tastes of these food items allow me to have different associations towards these items. Some of them tasted surprisingly good while other tasted surprisingly stale or unbearable.It’s interesting to have this kind of experiment once in a while to change our perception about certain items. However, if the frequency increases, I think I would get used to the new tastes and the level of surprise will decrease for me. Although, I might still enjoy the sweet taste of the citric fruits.

Astika Gupta

How did you feel about participating in this work- shop?

The first time I heard about this workshop, it definitely intrigued me as M berry was something I had never heard about and the possibility of a berry altering my taste buds temporarily was something I was totally unaware of. I was excited to attend this workshop and was looking forward to tasting the berry. Since I wanted this to be a complete unique and mysterious experience, I deliberately chose not to read up about this berry previously.

How did your feelings affect your experience?

I really enjoyed the experience and actually experiencing my taste buds being altered was one of its kinds. Though I was a little skeptical as to how a berry would actually do that, I was amazed that it really worked.

How did your associations change when trying the same foods after trying the berry?

Firstly, I would like to talk about the foods for which my associations didn’t change at all – dark chocolate and salty chips. Before trying the M berry, the dark chocolate tasted bitter and I expected that after trying the M berry, it would taste sweeter by atleast some amount. I didn’t expect it to taste sweet completely but after trying the M berry, the bitter taste didn’t go at all and it tasted equally bitter. So my association with the bitter dark chocolate didn’t go at all.
Secondly, I ll talk about the food for which my associations changed somewhat and not considerably- that food is bread. Earlier my association for bread was soft, sweet and brown and after tasting the M berry, the bread tasted sweeter by just a tad. My association did change after tasting the M berry and now whenever I taste the bread, I expect it to be sweeter than the actual sweetness of the bread.
Thirdly, I will talk about the food for which my association changed completely- this food is lemon-because the associations I had with the lemon before tasting the M berry was sour but after the M berry, the lemon tasted too sweet – as much as a lemonade and it was too amazing to me as to how a too sour food item can taste too sweet! It allowed me to have a lot of lemon slices without me changing my facial expressions, which earlier was the case due to the sourness. My association has totally changed for lemons, which is too sweet now. I wish though, lemons could taste that way all the time so that I can have them more often.

How would your attitude change if all food was to taste like this at least once a year, what about all the time?

I would be alright if all foods tasted like this once a year because it is a sort of a new change to the original every day tastes. But I am definitely not on board for the food items to taste this way all the time. I would like to keep it original and would stick to these tastes as I am used to them since always. Also, the M berry just sweetens a food item if it actually does alter the taste. So having sweetness all the time is one thing I don’t want.

Joshua Appleman

This kind of activity is totally up my alley. I rarely turn down an experience that broadens my horizons and makes me view the world through a new lens, so I was looking forward to it. In advance of the workshop, I read up on miracles berries to see what to expect. In retrospect, I think it would have been better to know nothing at all so the results could be less biased. Reading that sour foods tasted sweeter after eating these berries potentially skewed my taste perception. That being said, like most people in our class, lemons, limes and kumquats all tasted sweeter. Usually I wince when I eat these foods but the taste was so sweet and pleasant that I was able to maintain a calm facial expression. Additionally, I was able to keep the food in my mouth longer without swallowing, which wasn’t the best idea because the acidic nature of it seems to have made my teeth and gums more sensitive. Meals later in the day were a bit painful to chew on.

I definitely would not want foods to taste like this all the time or even once a year, which would be too often. I like sour foods and would not want to lose that flavor. The activity is useful in the sense that it shows the way we perceive the world is just one of many possible permutations. I don’t need to be reminded of that once a year. Once every 5 years seems like a better cadence.

If I did this again, I would want to be more mindful of the order in which I eat the foods. Going from most to least mild flavor would be ideal. I made the mistake of eating a jalapeño with a bunch of seeds early on which was a flavor explosion in my mouth. Foods afterward were harder to distinguish so I missed out a bit. Lastly, I would definitely want to try some hot sauce. 🙂

xiaojie li

I think this workshop is pretty interesting. The taste of the food changed because of the berry. As I am looking forward to the experiment, I participate more actively because of my positive expectation. My associations changed a lot when trying the same foods after trying the berry. Sour lime was changed into sweet fruit. I think my image for lime will be slightly different now. Though trying this once a year is good, I am not sure if I will be happy that all food was to taste like this all the time because I may miss the sour taste of lime. And also, my perception of surprise will be less active as I kind of know what kind of changes will happen to the food. So, it will be less exciting than the first time.

Puneet Sharma

How did you feel about participating in this work- shop?

I was very intrigued hearing about the taste alteration work-shop. And since I hadn’t known about the “miracle” berry, there was a fair bit of mystique that had built up going into the workshop. I do think a lot of it had to do with Lisa passing around the mBerry covers around (perhaps as an alibi?) and then warning us to have our lunch before the workshop. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been as concerned as I was after all that build up.

How did your feelings affect your experience?

Because I was so primed for the “miracle berry” experience, my already sensitive taste buds were further sensitized and ready to be messed up. Looking back I have to say it wasn’t so much as “experiencing” as it was “wanting an experience” for me.

How did your associations change when trying the same foods after trying the berry?

While I tried most the stuff that was laid out on the table, I will just talk about the things for which my associations changed the most. The first thing that I started with was chocolate and my association change the most before dissolving the miracle berry in my mouth. Since I’ve always loved chocolates, my associations with chocolate were dense, cocoa, delicious, smooth, happiness, share and craving. But after tasting (pre-berry) the chocolate, I was quite disappointed as I didn’t like that one at all. And the pre-berry association changed to weird, black, bitter, fruity (it had some fruit/berry in it). After having the miracle berry, my associations didn’t change as much as I thought. I guess I was expecting that the berry might make this chocolate taste good, but it tasted pretty much the same.
I then tasted the lemons, primarily because that was the most talked about item during the workshop. Interestingly, I expect my associations to change about lemons after the “berry” effect, and it did. But it also changed drastically before I had the miracle berry. During last semester, we covered a topic in Applied Behavioral Economics last semester, about the difference between experiencing self and the remembering self. Here my associations with lemon before tasting it without the mberry were fresh, yellow, food, slippery seeds, lemonade. This however, was my remembering self, that is perhaps a bit removed from the “experience/taste” self. So when I tasted the lemons before having the mberry, it was like a jolt that brought me back to reality and my associations to it changed to sour, pungent, citrus. And then again, when I tasted the lemons after dissolving the miracle berry, I was pleasantly surprised at the lemonade-like sweetness of it. I liked it so much that I picked up lemon slices as if were oranges.
The third thing that was interesting was the bread, particularly the before and after “mberry” associations. Before having the miracle berry, my associations with bread were brown, soft, sweet, grainy and hungry. But after having the berry it was sweet, fruit (berry like) bread, craving, tasty.

How would your attitude change if all food was to taste like this at least once a year, what about all the time?

After the exercise I felt I wouldn’t so much want to change the tastes of the food as much as my (or people around me) attitude towards food. I feel, if we all were to be half as sensitized or mindful of what we’re eating and tasting, the fast-food industry would go out of business in no time. But of course, without the miracle berry, because that would mess things up.

Ursula Kwong-Brown

The “miracle” berry taste testing reminded me of a neuroscience paper published around 2005 on the encoding of taste receptors on our taste buds. At the time, there was still debate about whether or not we have a “tongue map” for all the different taste types, or whether each taste bud had multiple kinds of receptors. As part of their tests, I believe that the researchers used genetic knockouts (in mice) to switch the binding site of one of the taste types (ie, converting umami into sweet). At the time, I remember thinking that would be very useful because I have a sweet tooth and maybe I could convince my body that eating healthy vegetables was like eating candy. After reading the NY Times article on the “miracle berries,” I had high hopes, but I was disappointed.

The “miracle berries” made all acidic things taste cloyingly sweet: the vinegar, lemon, lime, grapefruit, kumquat, tomato. It made the grapes a little bit sweeter, too. It did not seem to affect the cheese or crackers.

Prior Associations vs New Associations (for acidic foods):
I have always enjoyed acidic foods: I will drink vinegar straight and I used to suck on limes until I learned that they destroy enamel. So, my past associations were pleasant. My new associations were pretty awful: everything tasted disgusting, like it had some kind of awful Splenda or fake sugar additive. If the lemons had tasted like candy lemons, maybe I would have a positive association, but instead it tasted fake and unnatural, like I was eating something possibly poisonous.

April Dawn Kester

After reading, The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds – The New York Times, I thought this exercise was going to be some life changing experience. Foods just tasted a bit different, I was very underwhelmed.

Vinegar tasted a bit like citrus juice, but nothing I would chug down – it is still vinegar after all. The jalapeño was the most interesting because although the flavor was altered, I could still ‘feel’ the heat. The lemon reminded me of when I was a child and we would eat lemons from the tree with sugar sprinkled on them. The radish was the only item on the table that I did not like prior to the experiment. I was pleased to find the obnoxious, pungent ‘radish’ flavor was gone. What I did notice was that the radish had the same texture as a carrot. This makes sense they are both root vegetables after all, I’m surprised I never noticed.

I’d be really mad if all my food tasted this way for an extended time period. I know what foods I like and those I do not. I wouldn’t want to learn that all over again. I would also miss sour and bitter flavors.

Carlos Lasa

I was definitely excited to participate in the workshop, trying to anticipate how my taste buds would react to the berry. Though I wouldn’t say that I was blown away by the experience, there were subtle changes to the taste of particular foods that did change how I perceived them. There were generally three buckets in which I could categorize the experiences I had tasting different things.

The first category applies to the very sour foods – vinegar, grapefruit, lemon and even the salt & vinegar potato chip – I found the taste to be quite palatable after eating the berry. The sourness or bitterness disappeared, which was very strange to me. The lemon tasted the best, it was like I was eating an orange.

The second category of experiences was the opposite of the first – foods that I thought would taste better tasted quite dull and uninteresting. Banana, dark chocolate, blueberry and jalapeno fell under this category. For each of those foods, I had very positive associations for each of them, all varying differently from one another. But after eating the berry, the all somewhat fell under the same camp. I associated the taste with soil, dull vegetables and earthiness. Whatever flavor that made it stand out before somehow disappeared.

The last category is for the foods that didn’t taste differently at all. I experienced this with the almonds, and with the cup of coffee I brought to class. I was expecting to be surprised but the only surprise was that they tasted exactly the same.

All in all, it was truly a unique experience but I don’t think that I would want my food to taste like this either once a year or all the time. If that were to happen, my world would be turned upside down because eating is a very personal experience and, as seen in the exercise, I have many emotional associations that I attach to certain foods. It would be as if I was a baby all over again, trying to associate new experiences to familiar foods.

Ganesh Iyer

I was actually looking forward to this experience as the build-up to it involved people telling me that vinegar would taste different. Vinegar is too evil to change, I thought. Whether I’m proven wrong or right, I would have been rejoicing for my taste buds or my ego respectively.

Despite my skepticism in miracle berries transforming vinegar, I still overestimated the ‘miracle’ tag to change flavors for all foods which led me to clutching at a flavor different from what my taste buds were already telling me. Only after a few food trials did I learn to not just accept the change but to also accept that some things like peanut butter wouldn’t change. Which meant that my nemesis could still win.

But it didn’t. After the berry, vinegar tasted like a sour apple drink (like the cheap, guilty pleasure ones you get in Indian shops) and I still have no idea where the apple flavor came from. Maybe taste is just as varied as color; if you manipulate the light in which you see them, you can trick your receptors into seeing a different color, like an optical illusion. Even if the facts are clear, you can’t help but be awed at this momentary change in character. I must also note that the change in perception did not consistently overwhelm me for all the foods that I had tried, but it changed vinegar enough for me to have 3 more shots of it.

Despite my pleasant surprise, I would be apprehensive of living in a world where jalapenos had just raw heat and no flavor, bananas had only texture and fresh cherry tomatoes taste like rotten cherry tomatoes. A surprise is good in short bursts but if its sustained over a period of time, I’d feel an overkill and lose interest. If foods did taste differently for a whole year, I feel those 12 months won’t be enough to recalibrate associations that are upto a decade long.

Surprises at an increasing frequency would certainly make me a more curious person than I already am, however it would also make me lose some of my identity that my anticipations and beliefs constitute. I believe there is a frequency sweet spot beyond which you knowingly predict an outcome different from what you know. Sameness in that case becomes the surprise.

Hasnain Nazar

I was really excited to try the miracle berry and to experience how it changes the taste of things. After reading about the miracle berry it reminded me of a study I had read once about how sight plays a role in our taste of food. Reading and experiencing the miracle berry was just bizarre as you “believe” you know a way something tastes and for something to act in opposition to that was quite surprising. The foods I tasted included: raw sugar, banana, sea-salt, lemon, blueberries, peanut butter, and jalapeños. Not all of these foods had drastic changes for me but the lemon was one in specific that was amazing. The lemon went from sour to extremely sweet! It was like something out of willy-wonka!

If food tasted like this once a year – I would assume we would be shocked for a short amount of time but then just adapt. If it was all the time the meaning of the food would just change and all of its associations would be altered to fit the new taste. Its comical how fast humans can get bored of something. I would image we would all be surprised for a bit and there would be a few buzzfeed articles amongst wild memes which would then become dated and then eventually part of our “normal” life.