Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

When a peasant has a baby girl, the family puts up a vegetable every year and gives the jars to her when she's married. This

It was one thing to talk of using technology to topple the authority of the aristocracy and the Church, but who or what would replace them? Diderot and the French revolutionaries had assumed it would be "the people." But as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet once wryly observed, "The people, in its highest ideal, is difficult to find in the people." As

By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.

the poor were duped into fighting to defend the privileges of the rich.

New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day.

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why

Despite the fame of their bright clothing, Celts are described going naked into battle except for horned helmets. We are told that they had frightening war cries and that the terrifying songs of their ancestors were preludes to violent attacks.

Wars never end warfare, they lay the groundwork for the next.

is significant that the first attempt to build a refrigerator in the United States was undertaken for keeping butter (as opposed to what happened in Australia, where in 1853 James Harrison, a Scot who had moved there, developed the first really fully functional refrigerator and used it for chilling beer).

Europe needed printing because it was bursting with creativity. New ideas in the arts and sciences, as well as in social justice and religion, desperately needed to be expressed and disseminated. The Chinese and Muslim eras of innovation were mostly behind them.

Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called "tomato ketchup" in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. The

the four great inventions—paper, compass, gunpowder, and printing

The most famous ice cream shop in Italy, and now the oldest continuously operated café in the world, was Florian in Piazza San Marco in Venice. It was opened in 1720.

Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb either.

Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest

the longer wars last, the less popular they become.

Thirty Years War

Kement a zo fall, a gar ar sall"—Everything that is not good asks to be salted. Everything from meat to butter to potatoes was salted. Salt was Brittany's cheapest product, the one everyone could afford. Another Breton proverb was "Aviz hag holen a roer d'an nep a c'houlenn"—Advice and salt are available to anyone who wants it.

In Welsh tradition, a plate was put on the coffin with bread and salt, and a local professional sin eater arrived to eat the salt.

Philosophie du progrès, "We are

THE ROMANS PAID homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But

It is the presence of salt throughout France, along with either cows, goats, or sheep, that has made it the notoriously ungovernable land of 265 kinds of cheese. French cheese makers were trying to be neither difficult nor original. They were all trying to preserve milk in salt so they could have a way of keeping it as a food supply. But with different traditions and climates, the salted curds came out 265 different ways. At one time, there were probably more variations than that.

The Masai, nomadic cattle herders in East Africa, meet their salt needs by bleeding livestock and drinking the blood. But vegetable diets, rich in potassium, offer little sodium chloride.

In fact, the entire breastfeeding issue was an early version of the modern abortion issue, with men trying to make the decisions about what women should do with their bodies.