Process/Product
Yeah, I'm kind of an asshole.
Friday, February the 6th, 2009
037 - Confusing The Map For The Territory, Part I
I had heard about it about a week ago on one of my favorite online retailers. I relied upon them to seek out cool and rare artifacts that were relevant to my interests. Their hefty markup, however, encouraged me to shop around, and I had learned to use them as a springboard for finding cool shit, off of which I jumped into the vast sea of the global marketplace. Such was the case last week, when I saw something that I had to possess, and within minutes, I ordered it off another website for about 40% the listed price.
It arrived today in an innocuous manila envelope. Inside were two green boxes emblazoned with the pictures of ripe, red berries, and the slogan “Life can be sweeter!” Each package held ten foil-wrapped tablets.
I am, of course, referring to the marvel of nature known as Synsepalum dulcificum or simply the “Miracle Berry.”
When I first read that these things could make sour fruits taste sweet, I had to know for myself if it worked. I’ve never been shy about experimenting on my own body, and I will try almost anything once just to see the effects.
You know what they say, whatever doesn’t kill you…
The way that our pharmaceutical regulations work, drugs have to go through years (8.5 on average) of rigorous testing before they can be deemed safe by the Food and Drug administration. Only one out of a thousand submitted drugs makes it through this process.
This is one part of our not-quite-free-market economy that I can embrace. I am glad that only 0.1% of possible drugs are making it to the shelves. That gives me a little bit of hope that what I’m ingesting has gone through some quality assurance and is relatively safe.
It turns out “herbal remedies” don’t have to go through any of that. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration is not allowed to regulate herbal supplements!
Fortunately, this berry seems to have a limited sphere of influence, and my curiosity far outweighed my anxieties about side effects. With no hesitation, I popped one open and let it dissolve on my tongue. It had a faint fruity flavor that reminded me of those pink, disc-shaped candies I used to eat when I was a kid. I was at work at the time, so the kinds of foods on which I could test it were limited. I went downstairs and bought some lemonade. I took a tiny sip.
Holy crap.
It was incredibly sweet, cloying even, but still retained a distinctly lemon flavor. I took another bigger sip and was hit again by the overwhelmingly sugary taste. My tongue, throat, and lips could not lie though; I was still drinking acid, and my tongue still felt like it was being sliced by a million microscopic razor blades. Next up was some grapefruit cocktail from the break room. Miraculin does nothing to mask acerbity, and the bitterness of the ruby red was there, front and center. Even so, my taste buds were deluged by the concentrated sweetness of a thousand sun soaked pamplemousses. Gears in my head turned madly with the thoughts of what I wanted to try next, after I got off work.
I once assumed that experiences were universal. I thought that if there’s anything that I know is real and completely objective, it is the sensations in my body. Furthermore, I postulated that if you were exposed to the same stimuli, we would have roughly the same responses in our bodies, thanks to our analogous biology. It seemed like a pretty natural notion to me.
I quickly discarded this though when I realized that a colorblind person would see the world entirely differently than I do.
There is no way for me to ever know exactly how someone else experiences things. I can only assume that our experiences are similar, based on our shared genetics. Through training, I can improve my empathy and get extremely good at sensing what others might be feeling, but I can never be 100% sure.
I wasn’t unfamiliar with lemonade or grapefruits; I had been consuming them my whole life. I thought I pretty much had them figured out and that I had experienced all they had to offer. Because of the miracle berries, however, an entirely new world of sensations presented itself to me. Tastes that I did not know existed, that were not even part of my reality, were now easily reproduced. I experienced in that moment a paradigm shift.
I wondered what else lay just outside my reality.