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.
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.
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.
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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.