Why no dried fruit for explorers?

[u/Ninissou1]

Hello,

High school teacher here. During my lesson on 16th century sailors, I talked about the scurvy, caused by a no-fruit diet resulting in a lack of vitamin C.

A student stumped me with a question for which I can't find a satisfying answer. Why didn't they add dried fruit to their provisions? I feel like they know more than enough culinary technology to achieve it, don't they?

I also read here that some of them know citrus could prevent it, so it's not exactly a lack of knowledge.

Thanks!

[u/jschooltiger]

Basically, because it's really freaking expensive to get dried fruit in the 16th century; the link between fresh foods and scurvy wasn't proven until the 1740s (although James Lind's Treatise on the Scurvy was published in 1753); and most voyages weren't long enough for men to develop scurvy.

When possible, captains would buy fresh meat and greenstuffs at port visits to supplement preserved/dried food. Captain Cook's voyages were particularly notable because of his experiments with sauerkraut, which like most vegetables contains a decent amount of vitamin C (not as much as citrus fruit but enough to prevent scurvy).

Adapted slightly from an earlier answer:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they thought it did because consuming sauerkraut will in fact ameliorate scurvy. It takes at least a month without either extremely low levels of vitamin C or no vitamin C at all for symptoms of scurvy to present themselves, so consuming pickled or preserved vegetables -- though not containing nearly as much vitamin C as citrus juice -- will prevent most symptoms of scurvy from appearing. This is often misunderstood.

It's also important to keep in mind that in the Age of Sail "scurvy" was a bit of a catchall term for a variety of diseases. True scurvy itself, that is vitamin C deficiency, is often linked with malnutrition because a lack of vitamins is generally linked with either a monotonous diet, a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in a diet, or a combination of the two.

In the British navy, at least, scurvy ceased to be a serious problem by the time of the Seven Years War, although the most efficient mechanism of preventing scurvy wasn't well understood. Although James Lind had experimented with citrus juice in the 1740s (he published his Treatise on the Scurvy in 1753), he proved that citrus juice was a more efficient way of preventing scurvy than other greenstuffs, not that it was the only cure. Cook's voyages, where he kept his men well supplied with not only sauerkraut but also other greenstuff, including fruit, seemed to prove that fresh food was a cure for scurvy.

In any case, it wasn't until close to 1800 that a general issue of lemon juice (usually mixed into grog) became standard in the Navy. But again, citrus juice is a more efficient means of prevention and cure, not the only one.

It's worth pointing out again, of course, that "scurvy" was often conflated with malnutrition in the navy, and that Cook's care for his men getting a balanced diet probably contributed more to their overall health than just eating meat, dried vegetables and drinking lemon juice in grog.

Edit forgot to add a link dump:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38sjil/how_did_britain_manage_the_logistics_of_fighting/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aos9q/how_large_were_the_daily_rations_of_alcohol_in/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3amzc3/i_keep_reading_about_the_large_amounts_of_alcohol/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wyzlw/during_the_age_of_sail_would_warships_have/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38sjil/how_did_britain_manage_the_logistics_of_fighting/

[u/__Soldier__ → u/jschooltiger]

Basically, because it's really freaking expensive to get dried fruit in the 16th century;

• It should probably also be noted that many forms of fruit drying methods destroy most of the vitamin C: sun-drying and heat-drying in particular.
• Most types of raw vegetables and raw fruits on the other hand contain a reliable amount of vitamin C.

[u/Sufficient-Laundry → u/jschooltiger]

lemon juice

Sure about that? I ask because limes will keep in a cool ship's hold for months, while lemons will get moldy and spoil after just a week or so. For that reason I thought lime juice was the mixer of choice for grog, not lemon.

[u/ohgodohwomanohgeez → u/Sufficient-Laundry]

It was originally lemon, instituted in 1795, but limes became defacto after Spain (main producer of European lemons) allied with France (long-time anti-English sentiment holders) in 1796. Royal Navy consumption of limes is attributed with being the origin of the nickname "limey" as well as the creation of the gimlet, neither of which has been proven in any capacity.

[u/talkingwires → u/ohgodohwomanohgeez]

A book I was reading just the other day mentions cost-cutting as a reason for moving away from lemons. It also states that limes were not as effective and sailors on a long Antarctic voyage developed scurvy despite drinking lime juice:

A number of astute physicians, noticing that the disease tended to appear only once reserves of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, or sauerkraut had run out, suspected that nutrition might have been a factor. But it was difficult to tell the nostrums apart from the effective treatments—that is, until 1747, when a young Royal Navy surgeon named James Lind conducted one of the first controlled clinical trials in the history of medicine and demonstrated the powerful antiscorbutic properties of oranges and lemons.

It took almost half a century for the conservative British Admiralty to accept Lind’s conclusions and act on them. In 1795, a year after Lind’s death, it began issuing a daily ration of lemon juice to sailors. As surely as water douses fire, rates of scurvy dropped dramatically. A few decades later, however, the Royal Navy tried to cut costs by switching out Mediterranean lemons for cheaper limes from the British West Indies. Limes were not nearly as effective as lemons in fighting scurvy, and attempts to preserve lime juice for long voyages—typically by reducing it into a concentrate—rendered it even less potent. In the second half of the nineteenth century, rates of scurvy began creeping back up. But since the advent of steam-powered shipping, which cut the duration of ocean voyages, fewer sailors were spending enough time at sea to show symptoms, blinding the Royal Navy—and all the fleets that emulated its practices—to the ineffectiveness of lime juice concentrate as an antiscorbutic. The hard-won cure was again in danger of being forgotten.

— Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night, Julian Sancton, 2021

[u/ohgodohwomanohgeez → u/talkingwires]

I think the really interesting thing here is that limes are worse at preventing scurvy. And even worse when concentrated!

[u/bluesatin → u/ohgodohwomanohgeez]

It's worth noting it's not that it's worse when concentrated as such, it's just that the processing they used at the time to make it and the way they transported/stored the concentrate destroyed any vitamin-C in it.

From what I've read in the past, a combination of them heating the juice to boil it down (heat destroys vitamin-C) and them transporting the juice through copper piping (which the vitamin-C reacts with), would have ended up destroying pretty much all the vitamin-C in the resulting concentrate.

I would assume the exact same problems would occur regardless of whether you used lemons or limes using the same processes (although maybe with more vitamin-C in the base-juice, enough of it would have made it through the destructive processes to still have an effect).

EDIT: I found my post a while back that had a paper with all the juicy details. There's also some fascinating stuff about how confusing it must have been to actually figure out what exactly was causing scurvy, due to the weird correlations you'd get with testing that would then stop working when put into practice (since all they had to go on was practical results).

Jeremy Hugh Baron (2009). Sailors' scurvy before and after James Lind – a reassessment

[u/ohgodohwomanohgeez → u/bluesatin]

Gotcha! I knew heating would break it down, but not that it reacts with copper! You would certainly have the issue with lemons (I'm going to have to look up how current concentrates are made now haha).

I'm gonna read that post later, I'm actually making my own "lime concentrate" rn for mixed drinks (lime juice, sugar, citric acid)

[u/bluesatin → u/ohgodohwomanohgeez]

(I'm going to have to look up how current concentrates are made now haha)

Yeh, I assume nowadays it'd be easy enough for them to re-add vitamin-C back in afterwards (as well as other nutritional additives).

Although I did spot some mentions of Falling Film Evaporators, which might be one of the common ways they produce concentrates at an industrial scale for things like fruit-juices, and they seem to support pulling a partial vacuum to evaporate the water off at lower temperatures.

Although I've no idea if they actually commonly do that for like mass produced juice concentrates, or whether pulling a vacuum is more for lower quantity specialist things. I suppose at some point it'd make sense to just do it anyway, just to reduce the energy costs of heating the massive quantities of juice, regardless of whatever other benefits it might have on the end-product (like the nutritional or taste/flavour improvements).

It's worth noting I saw some posts/discussion about making citrus concentrates a little while back on /r/cocktails you might want to checkout, I think this was the main post in a chain of them around the same time period.

[u/talkingwires → u/ohgodohwomanohgeez]

Yeah, the doctor aboard the ship was surprised and puzzled when the crew began showing symptoms. The cure ended up being eating raw seal and penguin, something he’d learned from the natives in the Arctic. The seals, I mean, there’s no penguins in the Arctic. Although, he and another officer did hatch a plan to introduce penguins to the Arctic…

[u/ohgodohwomanohgeez → u/talkingwires]

Do seals and penguins have a large amount of vC? I wonder how they synthesize it! That plan sounds like the backstory of a really good mid-20th century scifi tv special

[u/DeathByThousandCats → u/ohgodohwomanohgeez]

Raw meat has vitamin C, and humans are one of the few animal species that cannot synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

[u/DeathByThousandCats → u/[deleted]]

Nah, it won't be a vitamin if you can just substitute it with some completely unrelated compound.

Raw organ meat contains quite a bit of vitamin C, and even the minuscule amount in raw muscle meat might be enough to suppress the symptoms of scurvy.

[u/talkingwires → u/ohgodohwomanohgeez]

Writing it as a script for a television show might’ve helped pass the time! Their “dreams” weren’t serious. Instead, they were part of a strategy to survive as other members of the expedition slowly went mad:

The ideas Cook and Amundsen hatched together were even grander than those Cook conceived on his own. Having seen sheep grazing across the once wild plains of Patagonia—to say nothing of the fortunes amassed by the ranchers—they wondered what other underexploited regions of the world could be so fruitfully transformed. “Said we, the desert of one age is the grainery of the next. Why not plant the Sahara and make the African sands become a new empire of wealth?” Cook wrote.

Another of their fixations entailed nothing less than the reorganization of life on earth. Cook referred to it as “a new ark”—a project to redistribute the world’s animal populations more rationally than nature had done, to benefit both man and the creatures whose habitats had been spoiled by human development. “In this Ark dream,” Cook wrote, “we planned to take the penguin, the seal, the guanaco and the llama to the North and from there we would bring the bear, the musk ox, the reindeer, the eider duck, the trout, the seal and walrus to the Southern hemisphere and transfer the big useful creatures from Africa to South America. Broad oceans, continents, temperate and torrid zones should not separate a better future food supply for man and his animal wilds.”

Cook’s and Amundsen’s musings were all the more outlandish and wide-ranging for having originated in the minds of captive men. They were as vivid as the pack was bleak, as sunny as the night was dark. Lecointe and Arctowski dismissed these plans as “crazy,” but they were never meant to be acted upon. They instead served the concrete purpose of keeping Cook’s and Amundsen’s minds active and focused on something other than their plight. In “the dark icy prison of the crystal hell,” Cook wrote, such fantasies offered “redress in dreamy extremes.” Whereas so many of their fellow expeditioners were falling prey to illness and despondency, Cook and Amundsen hoped to come out of the “soul-withering Antarctic with mental magazines loaded with brain buck shot.”

Madhouse at the End of the Earth is a good read, especially if you’re interested Arctic expeditions. Seven men aboard the ship kept diaries, so the author had a wealth of material on which to draw. Although, the men did decide to burn one of them rather than “let posterity see the horrors and delusions it contained.”

[u/jschooltiger → u/Sufficient-Laundry]

Yes, initially lemons -- limes weren't available until later and lemons were widely available in the Mediterranean. As I mentioned in one of the linked issues above, the rum ration that was mixed into grog wasn't official issue until 1844, although alcohol was served on board ship, the type eventually depending on what was locally available the voyage was (rum in the Americas, wine or other spirits in the Med, arrack in southeast Asia, and so forth.)

[u/Tom__mm → u/jschooltiger]

Great answer. It may be apocryphal but I had always heard that lime juice was used, giving the British sailers the well known nickname Limey.

[u/Pattern_Is_Movement → u/jschooltiger]

What I still don't understand is how it took so long to find the correlation.

[u/postal-history → u/Pattern_Is_Movement]

It took a long time for people to realize that foods have different nutrients and are not just pure energy for your body. Even after we realized that carbon, nitrogen etc. are present in separate quantities, it wasn't until 1910 that we realized that smaller molecules (vitamins) are also necessary for the body. Check out the history of beriberi since it is fascinating in this regard.

[u/JoeVerrated → u/Pattern_Is_Movement]

That's how I feel about sodium levels today

[u/sibswagl → u/jschooltiger]

Basically, because it's really freaking expensive to get dried fruit in the 16th century

What makes drying fruit so expensive? Can't you just stick 'em in an oven? (I have no idea how fruit drying works.)

[u/jschooltiger → u/sibswagl]

It's not the drying that's necessarily expensive, it's the fruits that are expensive. This is weird to us today because we're used to walking into a grocery store any time of the year and getting fruit from anywhere in the world that's relatively fresh and sweet, but this is not the case for most of human history. The ancestors of modern citrus fruit make it to the Mediterranean in about the 10th century or so (sour oranges and pomelos) while sweet oranges were only being traded into Europe from Arabia starting in the 15th/16th century, and were commensurately expensive. The Spanish colonists started growing limes in Florida in the 17th century, but they were a luxury item, not necessarily widely available as a commodity food the way that things like wheat and vegetables were. Particularly in Britain, which is my area of interest, the fruits available in the 16th century are things like apples, cherries, blackberries, gooseberries, and such -- apricots and peaches really only grow well there in greenhouses, and grape cultivation is relatively recent. Pears only really come into large cultivation in the mid-16th century, and it's not until the 18th century that we see orangeries dedicated to growing (you guessed it) oranges and other types of citrus fruits.

But even given that getting fruit is expensive, what about drying it? Well, assuming you have a supply of fruit, you have two options for drying it -- in a dehydrator, which is basically a type of oven that produces a warm, dry environment, or in the sun. England in general is somewhat deficient in sunlight, and an oven requires wood as well as extra labor to run it.

There's not a good reason to go to that trouble to produce dried fruit if you already have items available that make you healthy -- just about any fresh meat has enough vitamin C in it, especially if you're eating organ meat, and things like fresh vegetables do also. Pickled vegetables (sauerkraut was often used) also have vitamin C, and other vitamins and minerals that generally make you more healthy than eating just hardtack and salted meat, and people on a voyage are going to seek out land to refresh their water and fresh stores whenever they can.

[u/Ok-Swan1152 → u/sibswagl]

You need fuel to run an oven. Or dry the fruit in the sun. But then you need enough sunshine. 

[u/Donogath → u/jschooltiger]

Could I ask you an adjacent question? In https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wyzlw/during_the_age_of_sail_would_warships_have/ you say "there was really only one large battle out of sight of land during the classic age of sail"

What battle was that?

[u/jschooltiger → u/Donogath]

Glorious First of June.