Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a French monk, Marcel Audiffren, invented the world's first electric-powered household refrigerator

The adversary must first be made into a demon before people will accept the war. This was why during the Cold War, the U.S. government became infuriated at any

Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the last time the food of French peasants was sold as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.

Viking is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse vika, meaning "to go off"—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce.

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, "In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?

nonviolent force is a moral argument. The lesson is that if the nonviolent side can be led to violence, they have lost the argument and they are destroyed.

Massachusetts, like Queen Elizabeth, encouraged salt making through the granting of monopolies to those who showed the skill to produce salt cheaply. The colony granted Samuel Winslow a ten-year monopoly to employ his ideas on salt producing, which is considered the first patent issued in America.

Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs.

It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.

The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.

The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.

ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!

Castiglione has 150 employees. But every March another 120 are hired to work the tonnara. The leader is known by the Arab word Raiz, and the fishermen sing an Arab song, "Cialome" (pronounced SHALOMAY), to invoke the gods for the hunt.

At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40,000 vessels and 300,000 men.

Jamming was our ally. It made people curious about what we were hiding.

Newfoundlanders debated over when the cod was coming back. Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don't come back?

Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

One of humankind's most enduring misconceptions is that of nature's bounty... the belief that nature is such a powerful force that it is indestructible.

Antoine-Auguste Parmentier was an eighteenth-century officer who popularized the potato in the French Army, and his name has ever since meant with potatoes.

The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.

Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese' (Charles de Gaulle, 1961 speech)

The hams of Westphalia, which were dried, salted, and then smoked with unique local woods—a recipe still followed today in Westphalia—were very popular with Romans.

It is an old remark, that all arts and sciences have a mutual dependence upon each other... Thus men, very different in genius and pursuits, become mutually subservient to each other; and a very useful kind of commerce is established by which the old arts are improved, and new ones daily invented.

In 1411, the French Crown granted a patent declaring that only the cheese of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon could be called Roquefort cheese.