Mark Kurlansky Quotes

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Mark Kurlansky

Profession : Journalist

Birth : December 7, 1948

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.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky

History shows that any attempt by government to interfere in the consumption of salt is always extremely unpopular.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky

I think food is very important to how we live as people and as families.

Mark Kurlansky

It's true that writing and pastry-making are similar, but when you work as a pastry chef, you can get a kind of mania that everything you see is related to pastries.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky

I get up very early and write a lot.

Mark Kurlansky

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky

The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.

Mark Kurlansky

Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.

Mark Kurlansky

'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.

Mark Kurlansky

Children ask questions much more than adults do, and you have to wonder if this is something we have that we lose.

Mark Kurlansky

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.

Mark Kurlansky