Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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I have lost count of how many wars I have actively and largely ineffectively tried to stop.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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People have a lot of strange relationships with food. There's a lot more going on there than just, 'Oh, these crullers remind me of my childhood.' We have a darker and more complex relationship to food.
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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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I have an increasingly strong feeling that all of us, myself included, too many times make too many statements and don't ask enough questions.
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So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.
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In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being 'soft on Basques.'
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I'm interested in most everything.
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Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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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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I wanted college to be a real American adventure for me.
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Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.
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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.
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As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.
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I started writing 'Cod' at a time when people were first beginning to take an interest in the problem of fisheries because the Grand Banks had closed.
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I think we are drawn to anti-heroes because that is what most of us are most of the time and it is good to see that we are heroic.
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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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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.
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What people eat is not well documented. Food writers prefer to focus on fashionable, expensive restaurants whose creative dishes reflect little of what most people are eating.
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I was a theatre major and started off as a playwright.
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People are always asking me what my favorite food is. I say, 'Food that tells me where I am.'