Sugar as Currency

Making fruit sugar is costly. A plant has to spend real photosynthetic energy to pack a fruit with fructose, glucose, and sucrose. This is not generosity; it is a calculated payment for seed dispersal that buys a big boost in reproductive success.

Domestication amplified these traits. Wild bananas are small, seedy, and barely sweet. Thousands of years of human selection produced the seedless, sugar-rich fruit we eat today — so modified that modern bananas cannot reproduce without human intervention.