# Emperor Meiji of Japan's vitamin deficiency ## Highlights ### Japanese rice brokers > By the early 1700’sin both Edo and Osaka, a merchant class of ‘rice brokers’ had emerged. This network of brokers essentially bought daimyo’s (and later samurai) rice and exchanged it for paper bills. A sort of precursor to a banking system. This would actually cause some friction towards the end of the Tokugawa system with some daimyo actually being worth far less than the merchants/lenders ‘beneath’ them (you could also argue that this had the beginnings of futures trading - Useful as an example of the emergence of a merchant class, and also of [[2022.01.11 food as currency]] - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fjwa7yg3mk1r9nv31datva1y) ### Vitamin C was discovered in the 1920s > We kind of forgot about scurvy. That is, what people understood was that "lemons cure scurvy" not "Vitamin C exists". The assumption was that it was the acidity of the fruit that was the efficacious bit. The British Navy switched to limes instead of lemons after a while (which are even more acidic, but have less vitamin c) and also did things like boiling lime juice in order to preserve it better (kills vitamin c) and sometimes keeping it in contact with copper (kills vitamin c). So scurvy was a recurring problem until the 20th century, though a less severe one. It wasn't until the 1920s that vitamin c was discovered and we were actually able to figure out what foods have it and how much. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fjwa9t8qgyavrv7xmhxdz7a6) - used for [[2022.08.29 Woodworking, Cavalry, & Divination Games]] as part of the [[2021.06.07 Scurvy]] related section.