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Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky Books

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“When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.”

FoodTravelFishingFood AnthropologyCodCodfishBasquesSalted FishWhalers
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Scotland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in Icelandic sagas? There were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.”

FoodTravelFood AnthropologyCodCodfish
Book:Summary & Study Guide Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
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“The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold" foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food.”

FoodMiddle AgesCatholic ChurchFishFood AnthropologyFastFood HistoryCodfishMedieval Church
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish".”

FoodFood AnthropologyFood HistoryCodSalted CodSaltfish
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.”

HistoryFoodFishingWorld HistoryFood AnthropologyIcelandCodCod Fish
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?”

CultureNatureParksHuntingFood WritingFood Anthropology
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.”

Travel WritingFood WritingFood AnthropologyNova ScotiaCodCodfishLunenburg
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968”

PoliticsLeadershipDemagoguery
Book:1968: The Year that Rocked the World
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“Though [New Yorkers] live by the sea, they take vacations to go somewhere else to be by the sea. Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there?”

New YorkEcologyAlienationOystersThe SeaMaritime HistoryNew York History
Book:The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell
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“Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. "Va callar!" (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge.”

Food AnthropologyFood HistoryCodCatalanBasqueSalt CodBacalao
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“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.”

FishingWorld HistoryNew EnglandFood AnthropologyFood HistoryCodCodfish
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“Newlyn does not look like the Cornish towns on either side: Penzance and Mousehole. Those are resort towns where British vacationers practice that peculiarly British pastime of strolling the beaches and walkways, bundled in sweaters and mufflers. But Newlyn is a fishing town - or, increasingly, an out-of-work fishing town.”

BritishVacationPastimeFood AnthropologyCornwallCodCornishNewlyn
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.”

PeopleLoveTwoEnoughStoriesSeemsAgeCertainValuesGivenWealthValuablePursuitLove StoryVainQuestsTimelessEnough TimeMiragesTrue ValueSearching For Love
Book:Salt: A World History
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“Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. 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.”

IfsMenWorldWantHumansDoeNaturalEvolutionActivityUltimateSpeciesAppealsNatural WorldPredatorHuman ActivityCockroachesAdaptablePragmatists
Author:Mark Kurlansky
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