My only guess is that it helps with digestion. Do feel welcome to correct me 🙂
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There are actually lots of essentials acids, they are called fatty acids. Fattys acids are an necessary component of cellular structures, and important to all living organisms. This is likely part of the puzzle, as for this any other reasons organisms tend to have more acidic components than basic components. This is because bases are actually more damaging to organic tissue than acids are (when comparing the same relative concentrations. A strong enough acid can certainly do plenty of damage too).
As far as why acids make things taste better, I believe it’s because the affect the acids have on the molecules we are tasting (it almost certainly has very little to do with digestion). Thare are two layers to this effect: ionizing molecules to increase how strongly they bond to taste receptors, and adding more ions to the solution which increases the number of times those taste molecules bump into taste receptors. This is the same reason why salt makes food taste good, by increasing the number of collisions between taste receptors and flavor molecules!
We don’t produce vitamin c ourselves so we evolved to like the taste of acidic things like oranges/lemons, since they’re rich in vitamin c.
Do you mean why did we evolve the ability to taste acids?
It’s an indicator of fruit ripeness, for one thing. our ancestors probably ate a lot of fruit. Many fruits are at their optimum nutritional value (vitamin content and sugar content) when they are a combination of sweet and sour. So that also explains why we can taste sugar.
As others have mentioned, many vitamins are acidic, and so are fatty acids, but that’s generally not the main source of sourness in most foods. It’s usually either citric acid, malic acid, lactic acid, or acetic acid.
As far as digestion, we produce all the acid we need right in our own stomachs, and we can digest foods just fine whether or not they are acidic.
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