Is Fruit Getting Sweeter?

livemint.com:

“These are so sweet, I can’t manage very many," said a friend at my table one summer’s evening a couple of years ago. She wasn’t talking about dessert but about a bowl of glossy-dark fresh cherries. I bit into the taut skin of another luscious cherry with its sweet crimson juices and realized that she was right.

These fruits were so sweet, it was as if they had been pre-sugared. It’s not that sweet cherries are anything new. You only have to read Elizabethan love poems with their references to “cherry lips" to see that sugary-sweet cherries have been a summer treat for hundreds of years.

But the cherries of my childhood, which my sister and I used to dangle over our ears like earrings, were much less uniformly sweet than today’s cherries. Some of them were hardly sweet at all, which made it all the more exciting when you happened upon a super-sweet one. Is modern fruit bred to be sweeter than in the past? The short answer is yes, though the longer answer is more complicated.

Some of the most powerful evidence that fruit is sweeter than before comes from zoos. In 2018, it was reported that Melbourne Zoo in Australia had stopped giving fruit to most of its animals because cultivated fruit was now so sweet that it was causing tooth decay and weight gain. The monkeys at the zoo were weaned off bananas onto a lower-sugar vegetable-based diet.