IT's LSD for taste buds, it's a trip for sweetaholics, it's an innocuous looking red African berry synsepalum dulcificum that makes everything you eat with it taste sweet. Sour lemons become sweet lemonade, lime slices turn to candy, goat cheese tastes as if it is "powdered sugar" and "cheesecake" and Guinness turns into a murky milkshake.  

The miracle berry was first scouted as a new fake sugar in the seventies. But it's difficult to extract miraculin from the berries and purify it. Its future seems to lie in changing the taste of food itself -- scientists are experimenting with genetically modified miraculin tomatoes.

And it could upstage avant garde chefs who are struggling to achieve way out wacko flavours.

But the berry's true vocation is a trip. According to today's Gawker "Internet-savvy hipsters flock to Long Island City rooftop parties where a dealer/ guru named "Supreme Commander" hands them crazy berries to chew on, sending them into blissful fits of uncontrolled food-sampling.

     At his first party,,,  in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

    "You kept hearing 'oh, oh, oh,' " ... and then the guests became "literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table."

    "It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup."

Marc Lepine of Ottawa's new restaurant Atelier says " I ordered a pack of the freeze-dried version from the UK.   My staff and I are going to play around with it a little.  I can see at the end of a meal serving it with some unusual 'dessert' ingredients. "

To BUY -- Go to MiracleFruitman-Curtis Mozie