Not so much with the vegetables.

Scurvy is a horrific disease. For centuries it was the bane of pirates and mariners. We now know it is caused by vitamin deficiencies, mainly C and B. It came with a host of gruesome symptoms, including blackened skin, joint pain, muscle softening, difficulty breathing, rotting gums, and the loss of teeth. To add to this cheery list, sufferers emitted an intolerable smell (because they were literally rotting to death).

Scurvy sufferers also exhibited some bizarre personality disorders. The disease seems to have caused a person’s sensory mechanisms to go haywire. According to this BBC website, the smell of flower blossoms could make a person cry out in agony, and just the sound of a gunshot was enough to kill a man with advanced scurvy.

A variation on the maritime disease was known as “land scurvy.” It could be a progressive disease, flaring up seasonally over the course of thirty years or more. English people of means reviled fruits and vegetables of all kinds, and as a result, almost everyone suffered from a chronic vitamin C deficiency. According to Lacey Baldwin Smith in his book, Treason in Tudor England, scurvy may have been the reason for “the sheer stupidity of some of the treason plots” hatched by sixteenth-century Englishmen.