You know, I still laugh every time this gets brought up, because people do actually eat the rinds of various fruits. Lemons and Kiwis I know a number of people that just eat them along with everything else, and orange peel gets used in a number of different preserves, sometimes in the form of thin strips that you do eat when using them.
Plus the peel gets used in commercial orange juices, same as the rest of the fruit. One reason Tali might like the peel so much may actually be the reason why I am never,
never, allowed to drink orange juice - all fruit have salicylates in them, naturally-occurring chemicals that the plants use as pesticides. Obviously, most fruiting plants concentrate said salicylates in the skin of the fruit, rather than the flesh of it. Citrus fruits in general and oranges in particular have high levels of salicylates, again especially in the rind. Commercial fruit juices almost universally juice the skin/rind/whatever as well as the flesh, because once you've got the necessary machines it's cheaper, easier, and faster than peeling every single fruit before juicing. Which means orange juice is one of the highest commonly-consumed-by-humans sources of salicylates, though obviously the rinds by themselves are far higher as they're not sharing with the lower-concentration flesh. I am sensitive to salicylates, too much of them make me hyperactive - and you haven't
seen hyper until you've seen 6' 3" built-pretty-solid hyper - as I've aged and grown the threshold for what induces hyperactivity has increased, but never truly gone away.
If Quarians get some sort of benefit out of salicylates (or, originally, the dextro-equivalent, before Tali's upgrade), then Tali's body may be telling her that orange peels are the
best thing ever, and she may not understand why the humans around her don't feel that way. After all, the things that taste nice are generally either the things our body needs
lots of, or things that when we were evolving were
scarce as hell yet still important, so there were all sorts of feedback loops in place to ensure we made the most of it when we had it available - which has led to difficulties in the modern world, as we can get all we like of those chemicals and our bodies are evolved to tell us that's a wonderful idea, yet it's far too much of a good thing. I'd imagine it becomes even more difficult when different biospheres that had different weightings for what is 'rare' get involved.
Dextro-salicylates for Quarians could be something they were only ever supposed to have trace amounts of but were rare enough for the feedback loops to evolve and Tali binging on them could be as bad - yet taste as good - as humans binging on simple sugars, or they could be something that Rannoch had
tons of, but the liveships could never produce enough of for the whole Flotilla, and Turians don't need much of at all so Turian rations don't have an overabundance of, so all Quarians are constantly in deprivation of those nutrients and Tali could be the healthiest Quarian the Flotilla docs have ever seen even
outside of her overhauled immune system, just from getting the right amount of the (levo version of, but Panacea) proper nutrients in a way no Quarian has since they fled Rannoch.
