It was the book that put me over the edge. He pre-dated the discovery of vitamin C, but the details of meat curing scurvy, from records of ship wrecks where hundreds of men die of scurvy and a handful ignore the accepted wisdom and kill an animal and eat it and are cured, or kill an animal and hand it to the cook who boils it tender and they all die. Then explorers living on pemmican (a mix of powdered air dried lean meat to an equal weight of rendered fat) with no ill effects (though a brutal forced adaptation that you couldn't do now) then someone with a pemmican food supply who's warned "This was badly made and overheated, so it has lost its ascorbic nature (its vitamin C)" who ensures he has an alternative ascorbic solution and then goes ahead and gets the early stages of scurvy, and cures it.

These stories of men who lived at risk of scurvy are so much more convincing than modern assays of how much vitamin C in beef, and assurances that we don't need the RDI while not eating plants.

I would say it's why I don't cook my meat much (smoking hot cast iron, 2 inch steak, 1 minute each side) but I learned to like my meat like that from a pub that let you cook for yourself. After a few drinks whole minutes of cooking are too much. I drank and ate there a fair bit as a youth

Hmm. This tab is my lemmy.world login. I only had it open to watch for replies to old comments. Drat.