Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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I'm an urban person.
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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.
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Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.
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A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.
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As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.
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The fact that, almost a century after refrigeration made salt-preserved foods irrelevant, we are still eating them demonstrates the affection we have for salt.
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'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.
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The inventors we remember didn't invent anything. They're the people who took somebody else's invention and made it commercially viable.
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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.
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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.
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The Pilgrims were unified by their religious zeal, but they couldn't fish, they didn't know how to hunt, and they were bad at farming. In fact, they never had a good harvest until they learned to fish cod and plow the waste in the ground as fertilizer.
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I am of that '60s generation, and for people of my age, that phrase 'change the world' has a real resonance.
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My most memorable job was on a lobster boat. I was a pretty strong kid, and they just needed someone who could haul pots on 200 ft. of line.
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There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.
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I'm usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.
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Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.
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Salt is an unusual food product because it is almost universal - all human beings need salt, and most choose to eat more than is necessary.
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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.
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People in America think of it as a sad and downtrodden place, and I guess it could be, but it's not because that's not who Cubans are. In Cuba, you get a good story every day you go out walking. People are so funny.
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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.
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I'm friends with Studs Terkel.
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I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.
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You read about these oyster-shucking contests: Somebody did 100 oysters in three minutes, three seconds. I'm lucky if I can open one in three minutes, three seconds.
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What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.