An Analysis of Fruit Essay

A fruit is a fleshy seed that is often an associated component of certain plant and most are edible and sweet when they are in ripe states. Fruits play a critical role in providing vitamins and minerals hence considered a readily available source. Various fruits have a variety of tastes and other are sweet while others are sour in tastes. For instance fruits including mangoes, apples, guavas and watermelons taste sweet whereas fruits like raw mangoes, oranges and lemons are sour in taste. The varying tastes of various types of fruits basically depend on the compounds it contains. Fruits contain materials like proteins, cellulose, vitamins certain acids, sugar or fructose and starch and these compounds exist in varying proportions in different types of fruits. Fruits like oranges are both sweet and sour at same time and this is because the compounds listed above exist in almost equal proportions of both acids and fructose (Beidler, 1971).Raw fruits tend to have more acids and when it ripens the acids decrease as fructose levels increase thus becoming sweet in taste. Fruits have sweet taste because they have a lot of fructose in them where as others are sour simply because they have larger portions of acids in them as opposed to fructose. These explain why raw mangoes are sore while ripe ones are sweet in taste. Also raw bananas contain a lot of starch whereas ripe ones have most of its starch converted to fructose. Therefore the varying taste of different types of fruits is explained by the chemical changes that occur during the ripening process of such fruits (Hulme, 1970).Ripening of fruits entails the process of conversion of acids into fructose and starch which makes them to taste sweet. This is related to the elevated levels of fructose in the fruit making it produce sweet scents which serve to increasing the appeal of the fruit to animal consumers which are its dispersal agents. Generally, during the formation...