Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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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.
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As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.
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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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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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Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I'm usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.
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The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.
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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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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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Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
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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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I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.
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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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One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.
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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.