But what if we played practical jokes on our own tongues? That could be a thing that almost works, how 'bout it? Ok, well the words will continue anyway.
Synsepalum dulcificum is a type of berry that originates in West Africa and one of the common names for it is Miracle Berry. Miracle Berries have a molecule (or several, probably) that binds to the tongue and alters one's sense of taste for a few hours. In particular, they affect the sense of sour and bitter. And I tried them tonight before taste testing a bunch of other food to see what would happen.
The big thing to note is that, going into it, you would hope to get some mind-melding combination where apples taste like rubber, orange juice tastes like carrot or snozberries taste like not-snozberries. I was disappointed to find that there's nothing like that. Everything still tastes basically the same, it just heightens or deadens the various components. And it's only sour and bitter - if you try foods that vary from those two components, they won't taste much different.
So for fruit, the overarching theme is that fruit generally tastes better after eating Miracle Berries. The strawberries taste better, apples taste like really good apples, watermelon is pretty much unchanged. Tomatoes taste different but it's hard to describe... I would say there's a pronounced "ketchup" flavor maybe. The big, bold red letter items that changed dramatically were lemons and limes. Miracle Berries have the effect of converting sour to sweet. If you eat a lemon - and you can just eat straight lemon with no problem - it tastes like sweet, sweet lemon candy... or like sweet lemonade. And a lime isn't that far off.
Another category people talk about is hot sauce. I tried some and it is pretty interesting. Under the influence of the berries, hot sauce is still hot but it's muted and the flavor is (I'd say) better too. It may have been sweet or it might have been flavorless. I don't remember exactly.
I also bought an assortment of sour candy for the occasion. Sour candy is a fun experiment. The Miracle Berry blocks sour receptors so the sour candy just goes back to being regular candy. Skittles Sours taste like sweet Skittles. Mike and Ike Zours: same thing. A Mamba Sour just feels like eating a cube of wax - it's interesting in the sense that it's so boring.
Other than the lemon, which is the #1 thing to try in my opinion, the most fun comes from the "bitter" end of the spectrum. At least it did for me. That's the area that I was most surprised. Drinking Apple Cider Vinegar, I could still register that it was vinegar but it was really close to tasting like just apple cider. Normally straight, pure cinnamon would be inedible but it tasted great. The most bitter thing I could think of was baking chocolate. I ate some when I was a kid, thinking that "chocolate" meant goodness. Of course baking chocolate is one of the worst things in the world, but with the berries, it pretty much tasted like good dark chocolate. That was trippy.
The effects last longer than I would have thought. It's now two hours later and I'm just about back to normal.
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