There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.
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.
Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.
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.
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.
Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
History shows that any attempt by government to interfere in the consumption of salt is always extremely unpopular.
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.
I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.
I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.
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.
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.
I wrote a children's book because children have the most open minds. They are the people who really want to learn.
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.