Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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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.
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One of the things I am most proud of is refusing to serve in the military when drafted during the Vietnam War.
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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.
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I get up very early and write a lot.
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In 'A Chosen Few,' I spent hours and hours listening to the pain of people of who had survived wondering why they survived and what their life means and what right do they have to survive.
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When you're in theater, you inevitably wind up working in restaurants. I made pastry.
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Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.
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I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.
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Food is the best way to teach history and geography and most everything else.
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I would like to know what politicians eat on the campaign trail, what Picasso ate in his pink period, what Walt Whitman ate while writing the verse that defined America, what mid-westerners bring to potlucks, what is served at company banquets, what is in a Sunday dinner these days, and what workers bring for lunch.
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History shows that any attempt by government to interfere in the consumption of salt is always extremely unpopular.
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Children ask questions much more than adults do, and you have to wonder if this is something we have that we lose.
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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.
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I think food is very important to how we live as people and as families.
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I always wanted an extraordinary life. When it's over, I want to be able to say that I did it.
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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.
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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.
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I blurbed a nice book, not at all like my book 'The Big Oyster,' called 'The Essential Oyster.' I blurbed a pretty good book about meat called 'Meathooked.'
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Americans are so egocentric.
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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.
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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.
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I think that Judaism has been, throughout its history since A.D. 70, a diaspora culture that's all about being a minority. In fact, being a small minority. When I'm in Israel, I cannot get used to the notion that we're all Jewish. It doesn't seem to me that we're supposed to all be Jewish.
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Commercial fishing is always so behind the curve of technology that they were building ships with wooden hulls and masts in the 1940s, though it also had a diesel engine, which probably was used most of the time.
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As a post-Holocaust kid, growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish refugees, I had got the idea there were no Jews left in Europe. But I found in my European wanderings that many of them had gone back and rebuilt their lives.