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.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2021/february/finding-cure-scurvy
Gilbert Blane was appointed to the staff of Admiral George Brydges Rodney as Physician to the Fleet in 1779. Blane was a medical reformer who was convinced by Lind’s original experiment with citrus and appreciated the need for a practical way of storing them. After considerable experimentation, he determined that adding 10 percent “spirits of wine” (i.e., distilled ethyl alcohol) to lemon juice would preserve it almost indefinitely, without destroying its beneficial properties.
So like limoncello?
- Smoked Meats
- Dried Meats
- Pemmican
- Jerky
To prevent scurvy you don’t need megadoses of vitamin c - you need tiny amounts of real meat with no glucose. Glucose and Vitamin C both compete on the glut-4 transporters - so in a modern high glucose (carbohydrate) diet, you need a bunch of vitamin C to win those competitions. In ancient diets glucose load wasn’t really a factor, so the meat is sufficient by itself.
The most common sufferers from sucurvy were sailors eating hard tack
and not eating much else. That is basically a fully carbohydrate diet, which means lots of glucose, which means lots of glut-4 competition for the little meat they did have in their rations.
Pemmican appears to be the ultimate survival food, fueling ancient expeditions across the americas and the arctic. It’s a mix of dried meat and suet (fat), very energy dense, provides complete nutrition, and extremely storable for years/decades as long as it is kept dry.
Yeah sailors had jerky, smoked meats, and dried meats and still got scurvy. Hudson Bay colony had pemmican and still had scurvy outbreaks. The problem is most of the sources you noted destroy much of the vitamin c. Pemmican is a super food for macros but sucks for micros and still needed some forage to supplement. Famously the Iroquois would use tea made from eastern white cedar to do so.
On your glut-4 note: glut-4 is important for cellular transportation and diabetes can harm it’s use leading to oxidative stress but it’s not significant in uptake from food to serum which is the important part when we’re talking about dietary vitamin c. It’s also really incorrect to say glucose wasn’t a factor in ancient diets. The Romans marched on porridge and bread. High carb diets are a defining feature of the neolithic and beyond.
The sailors didn’t just eat meat though… they were typically also eating large amounts of high carb hardtack (biscuits), beans and oats as all were cheap and traveled well. Traditional high carb diets need vitamin C sources or scurvy can occur. A very low carb diet can get by with very little vitamin C because it’s not longer competing with glucose, but of course such a diet was rare in past times. The Inuits diet is one well known exception where the people might go most of a year without plant sources of vitamin C and avoiding deficiencies by eating organ meat which is rich in many vitamins and minerals.
The sailors didn’t just eat meat though… they were typically also eating large amounts of high carb hardtack (biscuits), beans and oats as all were cheap and traveled well.
I think it was also very common for the fresh meats and salted meats to be depleted quickly, and the line sailors only left with the high carbohydrate food for months.
Hudson Bay colony had pemmican and still had scurvy outbreaks.
This is a very interesting statement. I spent 15 minutes looking for references on hudson’s bay company and pemmican and scurvy and I couldn’t find anything. Can you point me at an account I can read please?
Vilhjalmu Stefansson’s book “The Fat of the land” chapter 10 calls out the pemmican wars (with hudson bay) specifically because pemmican was known to cure scurvy
A first nations history wiki saying the same https://gladue.usask.ca/node/2845
I’d love to read something more specific!
When I saw that picture I heard the *clack!*
Updooting for Max Miller
Here’s a really interesting article on how it was discovered that citrus would help. They were also able to preserve citrus and citrus juice with alcohol. They could also turn it into a concentrated syrup without too much loss of vitamin C.
From what I just read, they didn’t do this, but dried citrus, when dried at a cool temperature, retains the majority of its vitamin C.
We then forgot how to cure it: https://www.bluesci.co.uk/posts/forgotten-knowledge#%3A~%3Atext=The+discovery+that+fresh+meat%2Cbacterial+infection+from+tainted+meat.
And had to rediscover it.
That’s a cool read, thanks for sharing
I’m kind of surprised no one has said honey. While I can’t find exactly when honey was first used as a preservative, it’s believed that it was first used in ancient Egypt. I also don’t know if vitamin C specifically was ever preserved in honey but honey has been used as a preservative for fruit.
Jam is the classic way to preserve fruit.
Making jam involves heating the fruit, which destroys the ascorbic acid.
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.
Modern sauerkraut is often pasturized so that’s pretty useless for vitamin C.
Not where I live!
Nice, thank you!
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I fucking love kimchi
Just ate a kimchi grilled cheese, and yesterday had some with fried eggs. It is so delicious. I love sauerkraut too. Cabbage of any sort, cabbage is just an amazing food, good raw, burnt, and everything in between, delicious fermented, just good and ever so versatile.
Kimchi grilled cheese sounds amazing. And yeah cabbage is the best, though it’s really easy to fuck up when cooking it
I had a kimchi Reuben from a local deli a couple weeks ago. Basically a Reuben but with kimchi instead of
coleslawsauerkraut. Was insane.That sounds so good! Every time I get a Reuben sandwich at a restaurant it has way, way, too much meat for me - I guess they want to make it worth the price but it is unbalanced. I would make this at home though and perhaps will next week, making sourdough tomorrow, and have rye flour.
Instead of sauerkraut, I meant… But you got the idea
Yes, it was clear from your post. And sounds delicious.
Fermented cabbage, AKA Sauerkraut.
Cabbage.
Sauerkraut is apparently a reasonable way to store vitamin C for a long time. I imagine cabbage in its own doesn’t keep too well.
Cabbage does store better than most greens, but no, not as long as a preserve would.
It’s not ancient but blackcurrant syrup aka ribena was originally developed for this purpose when other fruit supplies were running low in Britain during the war
Citrus.
British sailors got the moniker “limey” because they usually had limes specicially to ward off scurvy.
Yes, but you can’t shelf citrus for like a year. I’m asking about long life preservation methods, not necessarily for sailors back in the day but in general.
Fresh meat contains vitamin C, as most animals can synthesize it themselves. Jerky is uncooked, just dried.
Fermentation can develop vitamin C, depending on what you’re fermenting. Cabbage is probably the most famous example, but pretty much everything you ferment produces at least a little.
Jam, or other preserved and/or dried fruits i would guess were common.
Jams are preserved by canning, which introduces heat, which destroys vitamin C.
Apples was used as well. And they definitely can be stored for a year under the right conditions.
But funnily enough scurvy was also called “the English disease” in some languages.
Limoncello instead of grog for the sailors
Dried chili peppers are a good source
Apparently meat contains enough vitamin c to fend off scurvy if you eat it fresh and not cooked to death (don’t remember just how raw it had to be); it worked for the Inuit. Depending on where your route takes you, that might have been an option. On the other hand, if you can get fresh meat, you can probably also get fresh fruit if you’re not on an arctic expedition.
Yes, that’s an option but it’s not a long life preservation method which is what I’m asking about. It’s just hunting/ gathering fresh food like anywhere else.
Preserved meat like salami has been around for quite a long time. My guess is it’s the same with fruit.
Live animals were embarked. Besides, the liver is a good source vitamin C.
Yeah, that’s fair.
pemmican is very long lived stable meat used on expeditions and retains enough vitamin c.
I think life was pretty cheap in that time and place, so very little time, effort, or money was invested in the well being of crew in the lower ranks.
That is to say, while it might have been possible to obtain fresh food, it often just wasnt a priority.
That wasn’t the question, though.
Oh, ok.
I thought we were just kind of chewing the fat, shooting the shit, so to speak.
If you want to be weird about it, your response doesn’t address the question either.
In fruit.
Fresh fruit spoil easily. How do you preserve fruit for months without destroying the vitamin c, before refrigerators were a thing? Though that really depends on how “longterm” we’re talking here, evidently citrus fruit were, in fact, the solution for sailing boats.
Lemons if stored correctly will last 10 months. My grand father would just toss them in a dark storage room in Greece and they lasted until the next harvest.
What exactly does “stored correctly” mean? I assume dry and cool?
Cool and dark, he would just toss them in baskets in a dark space that didn’t even stay that cool. He might have picked them before they were ripe but I dont remember.
The issue with recreating that environment on a wooden boat is that the sea is really, really wet. Sailing boats definitely had issues with spoiling citrus fruit, it’s part of why the british navy switched to citrus syrup at one point.
Your body only needs tiny amounts of Vitamin C and you can easily store fruit like apples for more than half a year without refrigeration.
I think the record I’ve seen apples last without refrigeration was two months, three maybe with a fridge. They were shriveled and slimy and gross but still edible. Not sure how well the C preserved, apples aren’t notorious for large quantities of it anyway.
Citrus is a bit less long lasting, either drying out or succumbing to mold.
apples aren’t notorious for large quantities of it anyway.
Yeah, I’ll concede that.
But again, long storage is not just feasible but relatively trivial - a cool basement, harvest before ripe, many months of apples to be had. Maybe it depends on the cultivar? Either way, for most of human existence in seasonally cold climates, storage simply was the only way for having access to fruit during winter and early spring.Preserving has been an option for much of our history and it works much better than just storage.
Edit: to be fair, both storing and preserving basically just mean keeping. I’m talking more specifically about dehydrating, pickling, fermenting, and candying.
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On a boat, possibly in the tropics, without spoiling? Doubt.
On a boat, possibly in the tropics, without spoiling? Doubt.
Huh, “sailors” indeed. I can honestly say that I hadn’t noticed this was about boats up until now.
Got a spruce tree? Grab the newer green tips on the branches and check it in some hot water. That tea is full of Vit C, and tastes like Christmas smells. And the tree isn’t going to go bad.
