The vegetable link yeah I knew, the clothing too (they were a bit more obvious), but not saiya per se, nor the other food named chars.

side note, imported mangas were my entry-point to non European languages, I went into a deep rabbit-hole to decipher the Japanese writing system. And the pair trunks/dragon was my first seed to solve that, except I didn't really know how they were spelled there torankusu / doragonu so it took a little while to associate consonants with vowels.