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.
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.