Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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I think food is very important to how we live as people and as families.
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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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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.
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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 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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In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.
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Environmentalists aren't nearly sensitive enough to the fact that they are messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods. They forget that the fishermen are the people with the most immediate vested interest in having a healthy sea.
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Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't do much research on the Internet.
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Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.
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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 wrote a children's book because children have the most open minds. They are the people who really want to learn.
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Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.
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The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.
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Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.
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I'm an urban person.
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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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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.
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Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.
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I think I'm a bit like Ishmael in 'Moby Dick': a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.