Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

The entire trendy foodie world - food writing, food television, celebrated restaurants - is all about food for the rich. But the most important food issue is how to feed the poor or the hardworking middle class.

A gourmet knows that the best part is not always the expensive part, and he will find that part, and then he will share it. A gourmet should want to share.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.

Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I'm Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.

People motivated by fear do not act well.

A true gourmet - a judge - has the wisdom to know when to stop eating.

Baseball players are not specialists; they all have to do it all. That is why I, and many aficionados, dislike the American League's practice of replacing the pitcher with a designated hitter. This creates two players who do not have to do it all.

When I was 13 or 14, I took this speed-reading course. A lot of the things you do in speed reading you shouldn't do to a good author, but I've been reading really fast ever since.

What sets baseball apart from other sports is the array of skills that every player needs: the speed, the power, the agility.

If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod... But it has among its predators - man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod.

I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.

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.

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.

I think that Judaism has been, throughout its history since A.D. 70, a diaspora culture that's all about being a minority. In fact, being a small minority. When I'm in Israel, I cannot get used to the notion that we're all Jewish. It doesn't seem to me that we're supposed to all be Jewish.

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

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

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.

I'm an urban person.

By modernizing the process of food preservation, Birdseye nationalized and then internationalized food distribution... facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms... and greatly contributed to the development of industrial-scale agriculture.