Left The Magic Behind

What do you miss most from childhood? Early morning Saturday cartoons? Christmas morning? Heck, even a good old imaginary friend that you forgot about until just right now that I'm reminding you?

I miss the magic.

I believed in magic for a very long time. That's not to say I don't believe anymore, but let's just say that as a kid I didn't have to have faith in magic, because I simply knew it existed. To steal a phrase from Terry Pratchett, when I was a child, saying I had faith in magic would be like saying I have faith in a chair. You don't have faith in chairs; they simply are there, real, unrefutable.

What do you miss?

Yum

I just came in from working in the garden, and though most of my time was spent weeding, I also did some pruning.

My hands now smell like a basil and tomato salad.

I smell delicious.

Taste Test

So I got them. Miracle Fruit. They're supposed to make me unable to taste any flavor but sweetness, even in things that you wouldn't think of as sweet, like lemon and hot sauce.

I have on the plate in front of me some cheese, some bread, carrot sticks, and celery sticks. From those relatively tame and innocuous things we move on to lemon juice, soy sauce, hot mustard, and Frank's Red Hot. I've left the two spicy things to last because supposedly spice will strip the Miracle Fruit from your tongue very quickly.

They say the effect lasts for 30 minutes. I aim to find out, and chronicle it. I'm nervous that it will not live up to my expectations. I guess we'll see.

Taste Tripping

As a follow up to this post, I went to Think Geek.com and bought some Miracle Fruit tablets. This is my quickly-put-together evening taste trip.

6:01 PM - I open the package and place half a tab (the recommended serving) on my tongue, and let it dissolve. I'm trying to assure full coverage by moving it to different places on my tongue. The pill* itself is surprisingly sweet.

6:04 PM - The tab is done. First, the cheese.

A very quick taste of the cheese, the bread, the carrots and celery are very bland. No real difference. I decided to skip to one full tab. I know, scientific experimentation be damned. That's okay; I'm not a scientist, I only play one on TV.

6:07 PM - Full tab is done.

Cheese: Hmm. This cheese is normally rather bland. Instead of the plainness, it has flavor. Strangely, it's more cheesy than it normally is. Not really sweet, though I do taste a difference.

Bread: The experience is the same: The flavor is different, but not overwhelmingly sweet like I expected. Let's move through the celery and carrot rather quickly by saying it's the same again. So far, strangely disappointed.

Let's change to the really powerful stuff; soy sauce first.

Soy Sauce: Wow. That's....different. The salt is still there, (oh BOY is the salt still there), but the flavor as this hits the front of my tongue is overwhelmingly sweet. I can SMELL soy sauce, but this tastes like drinking some strangely flavored salt-flavored soda.

Lemon Juice: This tastes exactly like a lemon candy. This is awesome. SO awesome. It's sweet. If this lemon juice wouldn't upset my stomach, I would turn to the lemon juice bottle and drink it. Unfortunately, I can tell quite easily by the tingling on my tongue that this would be a very, very bad idea.

Spicy Mustard: Vanilla ice cream. Horribly painful, tear-inducing vanilla ice cream. The first flavor is great, and then it moves on to the pain of horseradish smashing into my tongue, ripping small tears out of my eyes as a shudder spreads from my mouth to the rest of my body. That was...unpleasant, but flavorful.

Some time later, I move on.

Hot Sauce: Hesitant, I hit on an idea: I'll use the bread I have leftover to sop up some hot sauce. I'd rather not have a repeat of the spicy mustard. I sop it up, and pop it into my mouth. It's okay. There's sweetness similar to what I found in the spicy mustard, but not as strong. There's spice after it, and the flavor is more like what you'd get from a red pepper (no surprise), but it's similar to the mustard in some regards. I think it's the spice that makes me think that more than anything.

Overall: Slightly underwhelmed. The best was obviously the lemon, an item very full of sugar that's normally hidden under some rather strong bitter sourness from the citric acid. The least affected was probably the vegetables, which actually surprised me. Everyone always said that carrots are a sweet vegetable, and so I expected it to pop with sweetness, but I've just realized that this doesn't accentuate the sweet, it simply brings out what's already there and hides the competing flavors.

This will mean I will have to do this again some other time, with different food items.

What would you suggest? What would you want to try if all you could taste in an item was its sweetness?

*The fruit is prohibitively expensive, so I opted for it in tab form.