Sometimes the world seems awash in greenish extra-virgin olive oil.
Everyone, from the big box discounters to the chicest artisanal gourmet shops, is hawking it, at prices ranging from a few dollars to upwards of $40 a liter. The U.S. market alone is worth $1.5 biliion, and is growing at the rate of 10 percent a year.
Where does it all come from? Can it possibly be the real thing?
In “Slippery Business,” (The New Yorker, August 13, 2007, pp. 39-45), Tom Mueller reports that the international olive oil business is indeed rife with fraud. “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.”
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Mueller recounts how shipments of Turkish hazelnut oil and Argentine sunflower oil were imported into Italy as Greek olive oil and sold, sometimes mixed with the real thing, to Nestle, Uniliver, Bertolli and Oleifici Fasanesi “who sold it to consumers as olive oil and collected about twelve million dollars in E.U. subsidies intended to support the olive-oil industry.” Ultimately this hurts the small, premium producers “who struggle to make a living in a market awash in cheap, counterfeit oil.’
But it is possible to differentiate the good from the bad, if only you know what you’re doing. Mueller sits in on an olive oil tasting of five premium oils organized by the Corporazione Mastri Oleari, a private olive oil association attempting to combat widespread fraud in the industry. “The Mastri Oleari panelists were remarkably consistent, agreeing not only on the subtle flavors—artichoke, fresh-cut grass, green tomato, kiwi—suggested by the oils but also on their intensity….Even the most creative criminals have difficulty outwitting a properly trained tasting panel.”
Incidentally, next month I’ll be taking a course in the Sensory Evaluation of Olive Oil at U.C. Davis. The two-day class will include blind tastings of oils from California and Europe, as well as Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand--and by the end, if I haven't floated away on a sea of oil, I'll know a little about a lot of topics including "the multitude of flavor attributes...and the subtleties of complexity, depth and harmony in olive oil." Can't wait....