You know, sailors used to get scurvy because of C deficiency back a couple centuries ago. Vitamin C degrades really easily, but is there any way you can store it long term other than pills or tablets? I’m just wondering if it would have been possible to do this in the past with the technology that was available.
Vitamin C is heat sensitive but fermentation is fine and a good reason why fermented cabbage is popular in places with cold winter. See kimchi and sauerkraut, as rice or rye alone would kill you over a long winter. Similar mechanics going on for andean freeze dried potatoes to a lesser extent. Beyond that, it’s straight up foraging for greens and berries but that only really works if you’re moving a small enough group of people to allow forage to be an option. Plenty of leafy greens from forage allowed enough vitamin c to stave off scurvy for many ancient armies and sailors(though not all). Cook notably would beat sailors who wouldn’t eat foraged greens. The other option was uncooked organ meats.
Sauerkraut!
And lots of other fermented products. Possiblities are endless, chances of success are high.
I was also thinking dried fruit/berries, but I’m not sure how well that preserves vitamin C.
Drying can work to a degree if it’s cold, but it really depends on how you dry it since vitamin c is water soluble. Anything heat dried(including sun dried, which over temp and time will oxidize the vitamin C) is out and osmosis like salt drying can bring the vitamin C along with the water into the salt. Modern sauerkraut is often pasturized so that’s pretty useless for vitamin C. Finally canned preserves are canned under high heat. These industrial processes are a major reason why scurvy was so hard to treat at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Nobody could figure it out because they kept heat treating potential solutions. The British pasturized the lime juice at one point, for example.
Thanks, you make good points. I was thinking about basically room dried berries, not in an oven, not in the sun.
Not where I live!
Nice, thank you!
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