Of all the products on the supermarket shelf, one that has always concerned me very little is olive oil. This, after all, is a straightforward product, unlike so many of the highly processed, food-industry offerings with their long lists of mystery ingredients. Olive oil is simple and wholesome, its healthful properties well known for thousands of years.
Or so I assumed. One of the first things you find when you Google around the subject a bit is Tom Mueller’s excellent article, “Slippery Business: The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil,” published last year in The New Yorker. An enlightening piece. And not in a good way. Because it turns out the olive oil trade is to Italians what to cocaine trade is to some Columbians: a great way to get rich by flouting the law.
In the last decade there have been several high-profile criminal investigations in Italy, all revolving around the common practice of adulterating olive oil. Many Italian bottlers import cheaper olive oil from countries like Turkey and Tunisia (much to the annoyance of Italian olive farmers). Sometimes the oil being disgorged by tanker ships in Italian ports doesn’t come from olives at all. A simple change to the ship’s manifest mid-voyage transforms a cargo of cheap Turkish hazelnut oil into extra virgin olive oil from Greece. It’s a highly profitable business diluting the real stuff with lower quality olive oils and other kinds of vegetable oil, and unless you have a home chromatography kit, you’re unlikely to be able to detect that you’ve been swindled.
The fraud doesn’t just mean that there’s a decent chance your big-brand olive oil, bottled in Italy, has been adulterated. It also means that honest bottlers are forced out of business, since they can’t compete with the prices offered by bottlers of the adulterated stuff. It’s a good corollary of Gresham’s law: the bad drives out the good. Everybody suffers, except the crooks.
Although there’s definitely such a thing as excellent Italian olive oil, as recently as 2007 less than half of the “extra virgin” olive oil shipped from Italy actually met the necessary standard.
The blossoming Californian olive oil industry, on the other hand, looks like a godsend to lovers of good food in North America. Affordable, single-estate olive oils abound. It is estimated the production of olive oil in California will increase 30-fold over the next 20 years. Adulteration, thus far, is not a problem.
So what’s a shopper to do? Well, first, understand that the supermarket is not your friend. Big chain grocery stores must use big suppliers. The profitable trade in adulterated olive oil flows mostly through these giant supply chains. Most big grocery stores offer only the illusion of choice: many brands of “extra virgin” olive oil all coming from the same network of large-scale producers. “Bottled in Italy” on the label does not mean the olive oil inside is Italian, nor is it a sign of quality. There might be a good, inexpensive olive oil among the many brands, but it’s usually hard to know which is which.
Government agencies aren’t going to help you out either. They’ve got their hands full worrying about melamine and tainted peanut butter. Adulteration of olive oil is a rip-off, but it isn’t a critical health threat, so the government ignores it. The rule is caveat emptor.
The best way to score the good stuff is to find one of those specialty food boutiques where wealthy socialites hang out, or maybe a European cafe with a little corner full of goodies from the homeland. Or you can order online from a Californian artisanal producer. The stuff I got from Bariani in the mail was very high quality and reasonably priced too.
Warning: once an olive oil snob, always an olive oil snob. You’ll never be happy paying top dollar for the thin stuff again. As it should be.
