Journalist

Food is the best way to teach history and geography and most everything else.

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.

Everyone always gets a little irritated by imitators, but mostly I'm flattered. What if you never did anything anyone wanted to copy?

I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.

I blurbed a nice book, not at all like my book 'The Big Oyster,' called 'The Essential Oyster.' I blurbed a pretty good book about meat called 'Meathooked.'

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

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.

The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted.

I am of that '60s generation, and for people of my age, that phrase 'change the world' has a real resonance.

I have this whole section in my oyster book where I talk about how New Yorkers have gotten divorced from the sea and completely forget that they live by the sea, and I suggest that this happened when they lost their oysters.

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

Americans are so egocentric.

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'm friends with Studs Terkel.

Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.

'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.

Environmentalists aren't nearly sensitive enough to the fact that they are messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods. They forget that the fishermen are the people with the most immediate vested interest in having a healthy sea.

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.

The inventors we remember didn't invent anything. They're the people who took somebody else's invention and made it commercially viable.

Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.