Mark Kurlansky
Food is the best way to teach history and geography and most everything else.Collection: Food
Before refrigeration, most food was heavily salted. Many of these salted foods have persisted, such as sauerkraut, pickles, cured anchovies, cheese, salted butter, ham, corned beef, sausage, and bacon. We still eat these things because we like them. But they are no longer the mainstay of our diet.Collection: Diet
Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. None of these statements is true.Collection: Architecture
The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.Collection: Environmental
I love seeing what people are eating. It's a great way of looking at what is similar and what is different about people. It's sociology and anthropology and history rolled into one.Collection: History
The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.
A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.
I grew up in a neighbourhood where there was a lot of fighting. It's what boys did during school, during recess, after school. And I was a fairly large kid. So everyone wanted to see if they could take me on.
Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
Religion is a big problem in Israel and the Arab world, but again, the problem isn't religion but political leaders who want to use the religion.
Fishing in sustainable ways means fewer fish, higher quality, better price at the market. That is a formula that is good for the environment and the fisherman but bad for the consumer.
The Negro League had some of the best players in history. Satchel Paige was probably one of the best pitchers in the history of baseball, and many believe catcher Josh Gibson was a better hitter than Babe Ruth.
The entire trendy foodie world - food writing, food television, celebrated restaurants - is all about food for the rich. But the most important food issue is how to feed the poor or the hardworking middle class.
It's harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.
I have this whole section in my oyster book where I talk about how New Yorkers have gotten divorced from the sea and completely forget that they live by the sea, and I suggest that this happened when they lost their oysters.
Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I'm Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.
As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.
Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.
Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.
Montserrat is a very pleasant place to do nothing. The islanders know this, and they know this is why tourists go there, but they are not totally comfortable with the notion.
I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.
When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.
When I was 13 or 14, I took this speed-reading course. A lot of the things you do in speed reading you shouldn't do to a good author, but I've been reading really fast ever since.
I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.
People are always asking me what my favorite food is. I say, 'Food that tells me where I am.'
It's difficult when you travel around America to get local food; it used to be very easy. You went from town to town and were more in touch with things.
By modernizing the process of food preservation, Birdseye nationalized and then internationalized food distribution... facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms... and greatly contributed to the development of industrial-scale agriculture.
Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.
For some reason, some kids have a fear of food. Some adults do, too. The best cure for that is to try a lot of different kinds of things. The more you try, the more experiences you have.
There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.
Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.
Dominicans, Nicaraguans, and even the already highly skilled Cubans greatly improved their baseball skills when occupied by U.S. troops. The only acceptable resistance to a hated American presence was to try to beat them in baseball games.
When Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican player in the majors, his nationality was barely noticed. What the press and fans talked about was his skin color. He was the first black player on the Detroit Tigers, and a great deal of attention was paid to him as someone who crossed the color line.
I am of that '60s generation, and for people of my age, that phrase 'change the world' has a real resonance.
I'm usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.
I'm friends with Studs Terkel.
I always wanted an extraordinary life. When it's over, I want to be able to say that I did it.
I'm interested in most everything.
I wanted college to be a real American adventure for me.
When you're in theater, you inevitably wind up working in restaurants. I made pastry.
The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted.
I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.
There's a lot about the early history of salt that isn't known, including who first used it and when or how it was discovered that it preserved food. We were sort of handed, in history, this world where everyone knew about salt. And it's not clear exactly how that developed.
I was a theatre major and started off as a playwright.
I don't do much research on the Internet.
I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.
How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself - which is a little bit scary.
Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.
Europeans are far more anti-war than Americans. They've had more wars, and they really just don't believe in it any more. But Americans do.
The inventors we remember didn't invent anything. They're the people who took somebody else's invention and made it commercially viable.