Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

Infants who were suckled by the same wet nurse were regarded as milk siblings and were forbidden by the Assyrians from intermarrying.

Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature.

Segundo's best friend Silvio traded appliances for clothes, designer clothes—well, not really, but he thought they were—Chinese-made Armani suits and Italian silk shirts from Vietnam, all with designer labels occasionally misspelled. As in the "Versache" pants.

nuclear deterrents.

Pegasus claims that making red-algae paper uses less energy than making paper from wood pulp because there is no need to remove lignin. They also say that ethanol is a by-product of the algae papermaking process. Their paper tastes like—paper. IN

Circuit boards have foundations made of paper;

People who live in hot weather, especially if they do physical labor, need more salt because they must replace the salt that is lost in sweating.

Salt deficiency causes headaches and weakness, then light-headedness, then nausea.

General S. P. Lyman quotes Webster concluding one recipe: "Such a dish, smoked hot, placed before you, after a long morning spent in exhilarating sport, will make you no longer envy the gods.

teabag paper is not made from wood pulp but from the stalk of abaca, a banana-like plant grown in the Philippines. Abaca was first used as a paper source at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.

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.

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.

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.

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.