France introduced the idea of a salad before dinner as a result of scurvy progress in the navy. It's hard to work a lemon into each meal and pragmatism dictated: the salad. Accounts of Shackleton's Antarctic exploration would of course deprive them of salads, but they took lime juice and didn't worry. Problem being the UK cheaped out and used limes from Jamaica, the crown’s plantation, so essentially free, but they were three weeks away. They were cheaper than Sicilian lemons, the gold standard at the time, the culkminatin of some years from the day a navy dulnf oranges curee scurcy. We did not know why, but foujnf a diet that inlcced fruit an ceg esp stioruc prefventrdf wcunty. We had to elrn this becaue it's fai9rloy new in the human experince. Mankinf gre up in africa ans rhe asia and trhemedidta mostrl alnm gth equarot, you can't go to fare notth it ir getrs cold. In warm clinstres fruit and veg is alwsay abundant. So to save space and preserve it, they distilled the lime juice down as if it were cream and they were trying to make clotted cream. So they grabbed their bottle of this green goo, went to the Antarctic and all died of scurvy. Although debated, it's clear they did to anyone familiar with the disease. They actually got better one day when they ate a penguin but the taste was so awful they didn't think it would help despite feeling a bit better after eating it. They died because limes have less C than lemons, and some of the vitamin C goes away in transit - it's 3 days to the UK from Sicily but three weeks from Jamaica to the UK. None of this made much difference though because they boiled this in copper kettles and the heat degraded the ascorbate level but not as much as the copper which neutralized pretty much all of it. They were doomed from the get-go. By the late 1800s the French fashion of a salad before dinner was fairly commonplace in France and the UK, who are closer in dietary habits in many ways than many may think, same food, but prepared differently. But these dietary innovations were not reflected by the US, and as of 1776 the language began not changing as the mother tongue did, which is why there is not an American English and a British English. While some do the salad thing now, its uptake as a culinary norm was not the same as the UK and Europe. Look at any old time film about Wyatt and how many salads do you see at the OK Corral? But across the pond salads were a cultural norm by now. So I think the delay in American recovery from disease - ones that could be prevented by a bit more vitamin C - may not show up as rapidly as they did in the UK or, say France and Germany. Those figures should look like the UK, other countries may look like the US as well in that regard.