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[Euld]

According to the unwritten rules of the internet, it's considered bad form to make a first post in a suggestions forum, but hopefully I've avoided any consequences by bringing up this rule before I break it

I love the variety of crops in DW   It's really interesting how you're able to grow all sorts of neat stuff, both above and underground.  But to borrow a phrase from Zero Punctation: "You can, but why would you want to?"  True, dwarves will get a bad thought from eating plump helmets and drinking wine for years on end, forcing you to grow and brew different stuff (or buy it off the caravans), but that's about the end of it.  Mine seem to do fine on puppy steaks, kitty drumsticks, and the infusion of exotic drinks from caravans while my growers keep growing plump helmets as normal.  There's all sorts of wonderful plants out there, so why not force players to liven up their dwarves's diets?  That's where scurvy and constipation come in   If a dwarf goes a season without eating foods with the Vitamin_C and Dietary_Fiber tags, they get scurvy and constipation, reducing their productivity (dunno if it should cause an unhappy thought too, that might be a bit too brutal, although funny if even after the deaths of loved ones and destruction of masterpieces, constipation is what pushes a dwarf over the edge).  Of course, in order to prevent scurvy and constipation, they eat those foods at least once a season (eating those foods would also cure scurvy and constipation).  These wouldn't be new foods, these tags would be added to already existing underground and above ground crops.  Dwarves would eat these foods automatically if they are present.  That would mean though, that in order for dwarves to say, get their fiber from cave wheat and vitamin C from sweet pods, you would need to embark with a cook to make those into buscuits immediately, and sacrifice some of those plump helmet spawns for other seeds, but they would still count as a normal meal.  And as a plus, kitchens could have a new command called "Make balanced meal" which would create a meal that would supply both vitamin C and fiber, allowing a dwarf to take care of those needs at the same time with one meal.  Soldiers could even consider these foods as priorities to carry in their backpacks.

I also considered there being a Protein tag for foods too (obviously meats, but also for plump helmets.  Mushrooms seem like they would have protein), with the resulting disease being kwashiorkor (wiki link, but has disturbing pictures), but that might be a little much.  Balanced meals would include a protein product too.

[Creaca]

I don't know, a race that was created and evolved around living underground shouldn't really need any dependency on above-ground crops. Cave Wheat should have enough fiber for the discerning Dwarven Dietary needs. I'm not even sure which crops might have the Vitamin C tag. (Strawberries Maybe?)

Also, it should always be considered that the Dwarves are different enough from Humans that they have separate nutrition needs. (That would explain why the entire race hasn't died from Alcohol Poison and don't sleep for 14 hours a day due to a lack of Vitamin D.)

[Nidokoenig]

 Dwarf Fortress is full of things that are more or less completely optional, though. I quite like the farming, but until we can make proper orchards and the like, a vitamin C check is going to be a bit forced and there's just not enough variety in what you can grow to make it look like anything but a contrived way to make you grow everything. You'll need plump helmets for protein, sweet pods and quarry bushes for different vitamins and minerals, cave wheat for fibre, and oh look, only inedible pig tails are left. Embark costs are a non-issue, since seeds only cost one point and there's only so much your grower can do before he levels up a bit, anyway.
 The example of sweet pods is a good one, though, since they seem to be underground sugar beets, essentially, and those are apparently a good source of vitamin A and C and various minerals. Perhaps converting them into sugar or syrup should produce the tops as well, which can be used to make low-value meals.

 This is also another way for dwarves to act stupid, since food made out of byproducts of your syrup industry and berries will be less appealing than four syrup roasts and more expensive per serving than dwarven wine roasts. Having to make sure you have enough cheap, but nice, food on hand so your haulers aren't spending all their money on food and can't pay any rent is enough bother. It's my fault for leaving the economy on, I suppose.
 It's also not supported by the current stockpiles, since you can't specify they only have prepared meals that contain certain ingredients and thus have every dining area have a drink stockpile, a luxury stockpile, a cheap stockpile and a nutritious stockpile.

tl;dr, it's a lot of work for something most people don't give a shit about right now and would object to being forced to manage, much like the dwarven economy or justice system.

[G-Flex]

I don't know about that. I'd totally support some form of simple nutrition for dwarves in order to give an actual incentive to grow more than one or two things.

The issue with underground farming (aside from, you know, all the OTHER issues with it) is the lack of variety in the first place. Certainly, if dwarves need varied nutrition, three edible crops doesn't really cut it since it doesn't leave anything up to choice.

[Atarlost]

There's also the question of complexity.  Plump helmets are the only underground crop you can eat raw.  Cave wheat and sweet pods require you to build a quern.  Their products then need to be cooked.  That's twice the labor and requires two different tasks to be managed instead of zero (since planting is automatic once you assign crops and harvesting is allways completelyautomatic)  They also require empty bags.  Quarry bush leaves also require a four step process and bags. 

Implementing this will make the learning curve even steeper than it is already. 

[G-Flex]

In realistic terms there's nothing wrong with that. Real life requires processing of most staple crops before eating.

I always sort of pictured plump helmets as a staple crop, though, and you should be able to get along fine without perfect nutrition for long enough to set things up.

[Nidokoenig]

 The thing is, farming is only as complex as it is because it makes sense for it to be so, but nutrition is simple because if you had to cover a decent amount of the possible variety, it becomes Dwarf Farm. Soapmaking, smelting steel, manufacturing high-end clothing and working with magma are complex and have decent rewards for people who invest in them, but they're choices. Farming can put all of these to shame if you let it, but making it required would cause the same reaction that I get when a noble tells me to start a metalworking industry because he wants pretty things.
 I had a big post written up, but my keyboard wigged out for some reason and saved you from it. The gist of it was that to have steel manufacturing, soapmaking or a high-end clothing industry(weaving dying, clothesmaking) running more or less constantly, you need between five and seven dorfs' worth of work, including hauling for each of them. For farming, per Grower, you're looking at at least ten to fifteen dorfs' worth, depending on how and if you deal with milling, how paranoid you are about roasts rotting in the kitchens, and whether you decide that it's worth having a Wood Burner and Potash Maker. If nutrition was important, everyone would have to do this, and it's not like optional industries like soapmaking where you can just ignore it if you can't be bothered with it, and can let an existing industry lie idle. Farming is always on. Unless you're on a really strict population limit and trade for your food and drink.
 As an option in the init file that's off by default, it could be cool, and could be worked in quite well with poisons and disease, probably, but the drain on dorfpower, while realistic given pre-industrial agriculture, would be pretty unpopular.

[Granite26]

There's some good nutrition threads out there (Draco18s', I think), that involve Nutrients A, B, C, and D.

It'd be simple enough to create simple plants (plump helmets) that provide 1 of these, and then force you to grow 4 different types of plump helmet.  The more complicated stuff Cave Wheat -> Mill -> Kitchen could then pay off by providing 3 of the 4 nutrients.

Other fun with this is that you could make it so that different races required different nutrients.  Then, only dwarves could live completely underground  (Nutrient D plants are all aboveground, but dwarves don't need it), goblins could be strictly carnivorous, etc.

Of course, using letters to represent core nutrient vitamins and minerals is just dumb... no one would do that.