When a fruit ripens, it gets sweeter over time. Are the sugars already there for the fruit to get sweeter or how does it gain “sweetness” over time?
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Fruit contains long chains of starches. Starches are kind of like potatoes. If you bit into a raw potato or a green banana, it wouldn’t taste very sweet. With the right conditions, enzymes [chemical scissors] cut those long chains of starches into short chains that we call sugars.
Sometimes those conditions are just putting the food in your mouth. Your saliva contains enzymes (amylase) designed for this. Early Mesoamerican’s would chew corn and spit it out to convert the starch of the corn into sugars that could be fermented.
Sometimes, the fruit itself or even OTHER fruit produces a gas named ethylene that causes the fruit to ripen. This is the origin of the expression “One bad apple spoils the bunch”. As fruit ripens, it produces more ethylene. In close quarters, the ethylene from one bad apple could cause the rest of the apples to ripen, increasing their own ethylene production.
As an aside, this is also a quick way to ripen fruit that you want to eat. If you have some green bananas, put them in a bag with a tomato. The tomato emits enough ethylene to rapidly ripen the banana. I’ve seen articles that say the exact opposite – you can ripen a tomato with a banana. I guess it depends on which one is producing more ethylene.
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