9 thoughts on “Pressing issue: Olive Oil”

1. sy July 28, 2012 at 11:18 am

   My first thought is holy olive! How much is the postage on a gallon of oil? How long did it take to consume the gallon? Is this part of a vegetarian diet? Does he make his own chapatis? And where did all these ads by google come from: pure olive oil, olive oil soap…?

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2. Patty July 28, 2012 at 11:52 am

   I use olive oil from Palestine that I bought at St. Clements….Excellent!

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3. Doug July 28, 2012 at 12:35 pm

   UC Davis developed their olive oil center because the campus sidewalks are lined with olive trees and they didn’t know what to do with the olives. The story is that students were slipping and falling on the olives when olives fell on the ground. Rather than lawsuits, they now harvest the olives and have an olive oil center, comparable to their Mondavi Wine Center. Good stuff. I also hear that there are efforts on Hawaii Island to cultivate olive trees to develop a local olive industry. Still very preliminary.

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4. skeptical once again July 28, 2012 at 1:07 pm

   Here’s an article in the New Yorker on corruption in the olive oil industry.

   http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mueller

   In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union, prompting the E.U.’s anti-fraud office to establish an olive-oil task force. (“Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,” one investigator told me.) The E.U. also began phasing out subsidies for olive-oil producers and bottlers, in an effort to reduce crime, and after a few years it disbanded the task force. Yet fraud remains a major international problem: olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce—and surprisingly easy to doctor. Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world’s leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil. (For the past ten years, Spain has produced more oil than Italy, but much of it is shipped to Italy for packaging and is sold, legally, as Italian oil.) “The vast majority of frauds uncovered in the food-and-beverage sector involve this product,” Colonel Leopoldo Maria De Filippi, the commander for the northern half of Italy of the N.A.S. Carabinieri, an anti-adulteration group run under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, told me.

   It’s been five years since I read this article, but if I remember correctly, roughly 60% of the “olive oil” being consumed in the world is not really olive oil.

   On August 10, 1991, a rusty tanker called the Mazal II docked at the industrial port of Ordu, in Turkey, and pumped twenty-two hundred tons of hazelnut oil into its hold. The ship then embarked on a meandering voyage through the Mediterranean and the North Sea. By September 21st, when the Mazal II reached Barletta, a port in Puglia, in southern Italy, its cargo had become, on the ship’s official documents, Greek olive oil. It slipped through customs, possibly with the connivance of an official, was piped into tanker trucks, and was delivered to the refinery of Riolio, an Italian olive-oil producer based in Barletta. There it was sold—in some instances blended with real olive oil—to Riolio customers

   Who knows what that stuff at Costco and Safeway is!!

   This might be the real purpose of the Olive Center.

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5. @FreeRangeNan July 28, 2012 at 4:02 pm

   For authoritative info on olive oil, check out Tom Mueller’s blog http://www.truthinoliveoil.com/. You can follow him on Twitter @extravirginity.

   Costco’s own EVOO consistently does well in tests, for both taste and purity. Unfortunately, the Kirkland 1 liter Tuscan oil has recently been replaced with a California oil (not Kirkland). I’m hoping quality will be equivalent. They do still have the Kirkland organic extra virgin, which has also done well in tests.

   Supermarket brands overall are pretty bad, and even some high-price oils do not meet the standards for extra virgin. Caveat emptor.

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6. Richard Gozinya July 28, 2012 at 4:32 pm

   Does Popeye know all this stuff?

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7. Mr. Mike in Hilo July 28, 2012 at 5:49 pm

   I am grateful to all of you who commented about olive oil, and I was glad to read your recommendations. In response to sy about cost and other matters, I can report that my gallon of oil from Essential Living Foods cost $68, and that as part of the same order, I also purchased three packages of incredibly delicious raw, spiced, dehydrated Botija olives from the same farm in Peru. The items were shipped to me from California via priority mail. Altogether, I paid a little over $100–less than $12 per pint of olive oil. I think it will take my wife and I about seven months to consume all of it. This does happen to be part of a vegetarian regime. I am not quite settled about how to store so much olive oil. For now, I have stored most of it in wine bottles, which I have sealed with the Vacu Vin stoppers. I monitor the bottles and stoppers often to make sure that I maintain as much of a vacuum as possible. That system actually worked fine for my original gallon–we’re working on our second gallon now!

   Skeptical Again will find grist for the mill in the Olive Center’s reports about their chemical and taste tests of domestic and imported olive oils that they found on grocery shelves in California. The LA Times said about their latest report, “Nearly three-quarters of popular brands of extra-virgin olive oil found in California grocery stores don’t qualify as extra-virgin under international quality standards, according to a new study.” Skeptical Again will be pleased to know that Mueller has followed up with a book, “Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil”.

   Mr. Mike in Hilo

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8. Russel Yamashita July 29, 2012 at 5:56 am

   What about the olive oil sold on Amazon? I see a well known brand called Genco, but can we trust anything coming out of Italy?

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   1. skeptical once again July 29, 2012 at 4:13 pm

      http://godfather.wikia.com/wiki/Genco_Pura_Olive_Oil_Company

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