“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.”

American journalist and author

Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and author. He is known for writing both fiction and nonfiction, and for books that reached a wide international readership. His 1997 book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World became an international bestseller and was translated into more than fifteen languages. He also wrote Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, which won the nonfiction prize for the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.