Aaaah, olive oil! No other food is shrouded in such a deep and diverse mythology and, still today, people can get quite passionate on the subject. Around as a wild fruit for more than 50,000 years, humans have spat out olive pips around archaeological excavation sites for at least 8,000 years. It has always been a food, a medicine, a beauty product, in ritual and symbolic use by all big monotheist religions, mentioned in holy texts, as well as a lubricant of – amongst other things – Mediterranean trade. Described by this important Roman food writer as the first of all trees (“Olea prima omnium arborum est“), it was so important to the Athenians that they, under Solon, changed their constitution to assign the death penalty to anyone involved in the felling of an olive tree. Olive oil fraud has probably existed just as long, but one wonders what would have happened in Athens to all the modern-day criminals who shamelessly profiteer from the growing demand for the oil. We already mentioned here the adulteration of barcoded “black” olives, and our detailed Barcode Alert below deals with some of the worst practices in the olive oil industry.
Luckily for us, getting high-quality olive oil is, so to speak, a low-hanging fruit. Throughout the whole valley olives are planted and there are several co-operative mills (see middle photo below) in the area. We even planted our own olive trees two years ago, but they still look rather small and sad, with the first proper harvest probably another decade away. Worst of all, of the twenty trees planted, half of them have died. This is certainly one of our more long term projects…
Like all fruit juices, olive oil is a delicate and perishable food. So we only ever buy small quantities and enjoy sampling different varieties. We tend to have a couple of bottles on the go simultaneously, adding young, early-pressed, strong, peppery oils to soups, casseroles and hearty dishes that can take it, while using milder, late-harvest oils for more delicate herb salads and vegetables. The health benefits of olive polyphenols have been widely covered in the mainstream press, and we’re convinced it’s good for us. Olive oil is certainly far superior to the highly processed, wrongly called “vegetable” oils. However, some of the claims of olive oil as the ultimate superfood are overblown and deserve a bit of healthy scepticism.
Few foods are subject to as many scams as olive oil. The “trade” has a long and sad history of adulteration, and beautifully designed labels on barcoded containers are often cleverly conceived for maximum deception. Tom Mueller’s excellent book “Extra Virginity” published in 2012 offers a brilliant insight into the sad state of affairs. (His website offers a comprehensive Buyer’s Guide that we highly recommend.) The problems with industrial olive oil can loosely be split up into three areas:
1. Production Practices: Very similar to our Barcode Alert on cherries, all mechanical methods to avoid expensive fruit-picking by hand are detrimental to the production of a high-quality oil. Olives are sprayed with growth-promoters/retardants, are picked with twigs and leaves, can get injured, contact the soil and are mixed with rotten fruit already lying on the ground. Large manufacturers often use heat, solvents and/or hot water to maximise yields from their presses, thus degrading fragile fatty acids and washing out many beneficial nutrients. Italy alone has been reported to produce 800,000 cubic metres of waste water annually in that way.
2. Transport/Storage: Mechanically harvested olives are often shipped and stored in poorly ventilated containers, where they can become mouldy. The olives (and their oil) are often transported huge distances, since supermarkets and their customers somehow prefer oil bottled in Italy (by the way, most of the big Italian names have been Spanish-owned for years) over the country of origin of the oil, e.g. Tunisia or Syria. Read here how Filippo Berio, specialist of selling cheap Mediterranean blends as if they were Italian premium products, partnered with Cargill earlier this year to lend it’s “venerable” name (“Since 1867”!) as lipstick on an industrial pig: a concoction of 85% soybean oil and 15% olive oil.
3. Labelling: Like with most barcoded foods, industrial producers have far too much leeway in what they can say/claim/state on the product label, i.e. the only remaining link between the consumer and manufacturer of food. For instance, olive pomace oil extracted with solvents from the pulp of the first pressing is still called olive oil, although in some countries labelling restrictions apply. Don’t believe this is still going on? This U.S. importer just filed for bankruptcy after labelling pomace oil as “100% pure”. Refined pomace oil is often blended with first-pressed oil and can still be sold as “virgin”. The British Food Standards Agency has warned about carcinogenic contaminants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) in pomace oil. “Extra virgin” is a label that the International Olive Council assigns to virgin oils with no more than 0.8% free fatty acids. Bizarrely, “extra virgin” in itself does not mean that it has to be a pure olive oil: it can be mixed with hazelnut, colza or – like recently in Spain – with avocado, sunflower and palm oil. The U.S. is not a member of the IOC, so “extra virgin” meant exactly nothing there, until a “voluntary standard” was introduced by the USDA in 2010. In Australia, inferior concoctions made from refined olive oil are sold as “pure”, “light” or extra-light”, thus hiding their true origin and pretending that they have less calories (which they don’t).
Phew. So what should one go for in the supermarket aisles?!? If Tom Mueller’s excellent Buyer’s Guide is too long for you, here are our personal short suggestions for the barcoded world:
– Never buy oil in anything other than a (ideally opaque) glass bottle.
– If it’s cheap, leave it. Proper oil is hard to find under 12-15 Euros per litre.
– Colour isn’t important, but turbidity is. Go for unfiltered, cloudy bottles.
– Choose oils that name the estate. You’re less likely to buy some blend of north African oils.
– Despite all the industry cons, “cold pressed” and “extra virgin” should be on the label.