Who’s up for a Miracle Fruit party?

So Sweet

The good and bad

of sugar substitutes

By JASON BROWN

About a month ago, the New York Times profiled Synsepalum dulcificum—or “Miracle Fruit”—a West African berry whose chemical makeup causes flavour to bend on the tongue. Pop a berry, chew it up and for the next hour or so bitter and sour foods, like radishes and lemons, become “sweet as candy,” and Tabasco sauce poured directly into the mouth becomes like “hot doughnut glaze.” Given that the berry itself is innocuous and pleasant tasting, the possibilities of such an item are obvious: your body gets a plate of healthy vegetables, your mind gets a hot fudge sundae. Win-win.

At the moment, Miracle Fruit is difficult to come by. An attempt was made to commercialize it for the North American marketplace 30 years ago, but this fizzled out before a product was developed. The Times report tells of Miracle Fruit-centred “flavour tripping” parties, but if there’s any such hipster gatherings happening in Victoria, well, no one’s invited me yet; and no local supplier stocks the stuff. If you really need to try it (I know I do) your only sources are online vendors—like miraclefruitman.com—that trade in either the whole berry or freeze-dried granules.

Current availability aside, the promise of Miracle Fruit touches on the eternal culinary quest for some way (please god) for us to be able to eat something like a tray of warm brownies with thick velvet icing and feel no concomitant guilt—fat and sugar without love handles, energy crashes or tooth decay. Who doesn’t remember Olestra? A lab-manufactured fat that couldn’t be absorbed by the human gut and so passed right through us, leaving no caloric burden . . . except for the small problem of nutrient leaching and the resulting “anal leakage.” (Nice.)

But fat substitutes are a far rarer creature than sugar substitutes in the aisles of the grocery store. So far, there’s no acceptable chemical surrogate for olive oil; whereas a quick browse reveals many competing brands and substances clogging the sweet sections of the baking aisle: aspartame, sucralose, xylitol, erythritol, stevia, agave nectar . . . the list of substances—and a host of respective brand names—goes on and on.

Aspartame and sucralose, found under the brands Equal and Splenda, are the most common artificial sweeteners in North America. Both are highly synthesized chemical concoctions many hundred of times sweeter than sugar and are virtually calorie-free. Both have been declared safe for consumption yet there’s a lingering fear—backed up by studies—that the compounds (especially aspartame) have toxic properties. There’s a familiar war of statistics going on between the big food corporations and other, less-invested parties as to whether aspartame and sucralose consumption poses health risks. A fraction of a teaspoon in a cup of coffee, okay, but given the air of caution, I can’t see sprinkling the stuff on my kids’ oatmeal.

What’s left are the natural products (and some of these—notably stevia—have also been the subject of health debates) which John Cootes, the nutritional consultant for Lifestyle Market, walked me through. Xylitol, for instance, is an extract from birch-bark sugar and, like most sugar substitutes, has little or no calories and falls very low on the glycemic index. Except, says Cootes, “it has a laxative effect in higher quantities.” Then there’s stevia, a plant product that comes in various forms of powder and liquid. “You can grow stevia right here in Victoria,” he explains. “It tastes amazing when it’s fresh.” But Cootes doesn’t favour stevia, which has a cloying aftertaste that lingers long after it’s passed your lips. Cootes’ personal choice is agave nectar, another plant extract with roughly the same caloric value as sugar but with a much lower glycemic index. “You can treat it just like maple syrup,” he says. But while agave nectar might be the answer for diabetics and those looking to avoid sugar highs, it’s just as calorically burdened as the white stuff.

While there’s clearly a market for all the choice and hoopla, there’s suspiciously little enthusiasm when it comes to sugar substitutes; not one of them satisfies in quite the same way that sugar does. I don’t know of any baker who sweetens their butter tarts with tiny scoops of powdered stevia or aspartame—the reason being that sugar isn’t just sweetness on the tongue. It’s also got a structure that glazes just so under the blowtorch into fine crème brulee, a bouquet of flavour beyond plain sweet. Which, in a sweet nutshell, is the problem with sugar substitutes: there is no substitute for our old friend.

In an article he wrote for the New Yorker back in 2006, author Burkhard Bilger notes how perceptive humans are at gauging sweetness. “Humans are connoisseurs of sweetness. No other species is so particular . . . after a million years of omnivorousness people can taste every sweetener and they can tell them apart.” Bilger interviewed Charles Zuker, a molecular biologist who’s declared the search for the perfect sugar substitute officially over: there isn’t one. According to Zuker, whose company supplies chemical taste-booster ingredients to other companies like Kraft and Cadbury-Schwepps, the future is in products that work with sugar to improve its kick, making less of it taste like more. Not a bad idea, considering the average North American ate between 100 and 150 lbs of sugar last year.

Still, whatever happened to plain old willpower? Maybe I could just eat half a brownie and share the rest with my friends . . . ? Now that would be a miracle. M

Strawberry Cream (for six)

This recipe comes from Favourite Dessert Recipes, which is part of the Salmon Series, a charming, no-nonsense set of booklets that are, sadly, only available in the UK. It’s an easy dessert and a perfect way to mark both the irreplaceable appeal of actual sugar and one of the first fruits of summer.

• 1 lb. ripe strawberries, stemmed

• 6 oz. sugar

• 1 pint double cream, lightly whipped

• 1½ oz. gelatine dissolved in 5 oz. hot water and cooled

Beat the strawberries to a pulp, then stir in the sugar. Force the mixture through a sieve to get it good and smooth, then fold in the lightly whipped cream. Add the gelatine and stir until it begins to set. Pour the mixture into sundae glasses and let them set in the fridge for 10-15 minutes or until firm.